![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bookstorememories.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Newstand-sith-boy-and-streetcars.jpg?resize=584%2C584\")
<\/h1>\n<\/h1>\nBack in the 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles still had a few scattered shops that sold old magazines, comics and pulps.\u00a0 They were dusty, piled high with stacks of great colorful old magazines, and offered up pretty cheap entertainment.\u00a0 I’ll list a few of these as I remember them, all of them now long gone.<\/p>\n
ABC Book and Magazine Research.\u00a0 7064 Hollywood Blvd.<\/strong><\/p>\n All that I have left is a rubber stamp inside a paperback book.<\/p><\/div>\n When I was a teen ager I lived with my Grandparents a couple blocks west of La Brea on Hawthorne Ave.\u00a0 I attended Hollywood High School, so I was very familiar with Hollywood Blvd., and all the great old book shops.\u00a0 Week day evenings I sold the Examiner for 2 hours at the corner of La Brea and Hollywood.<\/p>\n I soon noticed that just east of Hollywood and La Brea, in an old store front, was a magazine store called ABC Book and Magazine Research.\u00a0 I started going in there on Saturdays with my meagre newspaper sales money and to me the dusty old place was a wonderland.\u00a0 The proprietor was classic, a thin, nervious man in his sixties with thick glasses.\u00a0 He looked like an old scrooge and had about as bad a temperament as one could get.\u00a0 He despised children and young folks, and never, ever, gave out a happy “hello” salutation.<\/p>\n I was always overly polite, because if old scrooge would have let me, I would have stayed there all day rooting through the piles and piles stacked everywhere.\u00a0 All the important weekly magazines were there, Life, Look, Post and stacks of magazines going back into the 1930s.\u00a0 The store was also jammed with paperback books, and at that time period that I was there most of the used paperbacks were from the late forties to the 1950s.\u00a0 Let your imagination soar, Dell mapbacks, Avon Murder Mystery Monthlies, you name it.\u00a0 He would stamp all the paperbacks with his sloppy rubber stamp, but notice that he was “renting” the books – bring one back and pay 8 cents and get another one to read.\u00a0 Not bad, most paperbacks were 25 cents or 35 cents in those days, so if you wanted to read a batch of science fiction you could do so cheaply.\u00a0 In 1960 a gallon of gas was about 25.99 cents, a pack of cigarettes 25 cents, a coke was usually a dime or 15 cents.\u00a0 See how little your dollar is worth now?<\/p>\n I didn’t pay much attention to the comics at that time, I had already been through a comic book crisis in my earlier years.\u00a0 I subscribed to the first “Mad” comics and was spending my hard earned money from paper routes and weed pulling on war comics and horror comics.\u00a0 My parents went ballistic when they saw my collection of all those now rare comics and trashed them and forbid me to ever buy another one.\u00a0 They even marched me into the local drug store and told the owner not to sell me any more comics.\u00a0 I was devasted by this.\u00a0 I didn’t really understand that I had done anything wrong.\u00a0 I had worked for the money and spent it on something I loved to read, but there was a big propaganda campaign in the fifties telling parents that your kid’s mind would be warped forever because all the writers of the comics were communists.\u00a0 So because of my earlier bad experience I shied away from the comics.\u00a0 Now that I was in High School, my focus was on “serious” magazines like Life, Look, and Post.\u00a0 I was also reading a lot of science fiction paperbacks.<\/p>\n Old scrooge would only let me stay in the shop for 20 or 30 minutes, and then demand that I buy something and leave.\u00a0 I could always find a great paperback, and I never brought any back.\u00a0 Screw the 8 cents, I wanted to keep the books forever.<\/p>\n ABC had to move sometime in the 1960s, and they moved to a smaller shop almost directly across the street on the north side of Hollywood.\u00a0 I think they were gone by the 1970s.\u00a0 I had discovered Pickwick Bookshop by then and was spending so much time there that I forgot about ABC Magazine and the old grouch who owned it.<\/p>\n Marlow’s Bookshop,\u00a0 \u00a0 Hollywood Blvd. and Argyle.<\/strong><\/p>\n Marlow’s at Argyle and Hollywood Blvd.<\/p><\/div>\n The following is from one of the Hollywood Boulevard Bookstore Follies articles.\u00a0 I’m reprinting it here with some additional comments.<\/p>\n The first stop is right on the corner of Hollywood and Argyle,\u00a0\u00a0MARLOW\u2019S BOOKSHOP.<\/strong> \u00a0Owned by -you guessed it \u2013 a gentleman named Marlow, this store opened in the early 70s.\u00a0 \u00a0It has a general stock of used books, but specializes in back issue periodicals and in research (mainly for the film industry). \u00a0A graduate engineer before he got into the book business, Marlow said he recently got a call from the filmmakers of\u00a0All The President\u2019s Men<\/em>. \u00a0They needed to duplicate the library of\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0for some of the scenes, so \u00a0Marlow rented them an entire set-up of 10,000 books. \u00a0It was a rush job , he put it together overnight so the film company could start shooting the scene the next day!<\/p>\n Notice the 50% off sign in the window. \u00a0This came about when Marlow had stopped over to Hollywood Book City. \u00a0While chatting with Book City owner Alan Siegel, he complained that business was a little slow. \u00a0\u201cWhy don\u2019t you have a sale?\u201d said Alan, \u201cIt will bring in some new business.\u201d \u00a0Marlow said he would try it, but didn\u2019t know how to start. \u00a0Alan generously loaned Marlow a beautiful large banner that said \u201cAnniversary Sale, 50% Off\u201d. \u00a0Marlow borrowed the banner and put it up on his shop (not shown in the photo). \u00a0It worked so well that he kept the banner up there permanently, and refused to give it back to Alan. \u201cThat damned banner cost me over a $100,\u201d said Siegel. \u00a0\u201cNo good deed goes unpunished on this street\u201d he said sadly. To make matters worse, a couple of Marlow\u2019s customers claim that he doubled the price on most items in order not to sell too cheaply. \u00a0I can only say that these are at the moment unsubstantiated and unproven claims, but certainly in the realm of bookstore lore.<\/p>\n I used to drop by Marlow’s from time to time, mainly looking for early bound periodicals.\u00a0 Marlow was a stocky man in his 60’s and seemed to have a short fuse, especially when asked for a discount.\u00a0 At some point in the 1980s he was forced to move out and eventually ended up on Lincoln Ave. in West Los Angeles.\u00a0 Along the way he had rented a lot of storage units and jammed them full of periodicals.\u00a0 Every so often one would turn up with unpaid rent and be sold to some book scout pretty cheap.<\/p>\n Marlow fell ill and hired a young African American guy to run the shop, and he kept it open after Marlow died.\u00a0 He didn’t know much abut the book business, but he was a really nice young guy and was eager to learn.\u00a0 He had some consignment deal with Marlow’s family and he tried to make a go of it.\u00a0 I think the store closed in the 1990s.\u00a0 Marlow always had a big selection of magazines and it was a great place to browse.<\/p>\n Garvin’s Hollywood Book Store and the Secret Magazine Warehouse.<\/strong><\/p>\n Paul Hunt, Keith Burns and Bruce Cervon enter the Secret Magazine Warehouse<\/p><\/div>\n Jack Garvin, 1987<\/p><\/div>\n The story of the Secret Magazine Warehouse is a douzy.\u00a0 I’ll start it here with reprinting the original article about Kovach, Mark Trout, and Jack Garvin.\u00a0 Then I’ll add in some additional information that is part of the legend of Nick Kovach’s massive warehouse.<\/p>\n Walking on a few doors will bring you to\u00a0HOLLYWOOD BOOK SHOP.<\/strong> \u00a0This store has been here about three years, although one of the owners has been in the book business in Hollywood about 10 years. \u00a0They carry a large general stock of used and out-of-print books. The partners, Jack Garvin and Ray Cantor are polar opposites, at times engaging in bitter quarrels. \u00a0Garvin, a stocky man who resembles Nikita Khrushchev, started as a book scout, operating out of a garage behind some storefronts on Adams Avenue, east of Western, a once rich area that has seen better days. \u00a0He is also into minerals and geology, and this specialty led him to buy equipment to cut geodes and polishing machinery to further enhance specimens that he buys. \u00a0Jack is a chain-smoking, gruff man to deal with, Ray the nicer of the two, but they have built up an excellent stock of books.\u00a0 See my articles on Jack Garvin called “The Rock Man” elsewhere on this site.<\/p>\n Recently (1970s) they purchased a large warehouse stuffed with magazines and pamphlets. \u00a0The story behind this is an odd one. \u00a0There was a periodicals dealer down in the South Los Angeles area by the name of Nick Kovach, who was dealing in scholarly periodicals back in the 1950s. \u00a0When the Russians launched Sputnik, it was a big kick in the rear to the U.S. educational system, which all of a sudden woke up to the sad fact that this great country was falling behind in science and technology. \u00a0Kovach found himself to be center stage in the arena of scientific and mathematical periodicals, courted by libraries across the country who needed this material. \u00a0He bought and sold enormous quantities of paper goods and magazines, filling up many warehouses. \u00a0In later years he realized that the collections included a lot of non-scientific stuff that was of no use to the libraries at the great universities and corporations. \u00a0So Kovach started to dispose of tonnage of this stuff, which was mainly popular culture and mainstream magazines.<\/p>\n Along came a roving dealer named Mark Trout, who traveled around the country in a van, looking for this kind of material. \u00a0He \u201cleased\u201d the rights to an old, long closed-down bowling alley in South Los Angeles from Kovach \u00a0that was jam packed with just the right stuff that he wanted: \u00a0popular magazines, like Life, Time, Fortune, and the such. \u00a0Trout made a great amount of money over the years selling this at flea markets. \u00a0One time, at the Rose Bowl flea market, Trout showed up with a stack of over 50 Number 1 Life magazines in mint condition. The collectors went berserk. \u00a0After milking the contents of the bowling alley for a number of years, Trout offered to transfer the \u201clease\u201d to Jack Garvin and his partner. \u00a0All the great popular magazines had been removed and sold by Trout, but the place was still jammed with pamphlets, ephemera and lesser-known periodicals. \u00a0Garvin pulled out van loads of great stuff, including a world-class collection of pamphlets and rare broadsides on the subject of American radicalism, which he is selling to libraries at big prices. Garvin and Canter go down to their bowling alley once a week and pack their old van full of paper goodies and rare ephemera. \u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s like owning a gold mine,\u201d Jack once told me. \u00a0\u201cEvery once in a while we hit a particularly good vein!\u201d \u00a0And it is enough material for years to come.<\/p>\n When Jack’s partner Ray dropped dead after a 45 minute screaming match with Jack one night, Jack Garvin became the sole owner of Hollywood Book Shop, (after paying off Ray’s wife).\u00a0 I talked Garvin into moving out to Burbank, which he did, but that meant he had to dump the Secret Magazine Warehouse on someone else.\u00a0 Garvin found a young couple who took over the “lease” on the bowling alley.\u00a0 In a funny incident, Garvin told me that he and Ray had to use flash lights because there was no electricity in the basement of the bowling alley.\u00a0 When the new prospects came in, the pretty lady buyer, a school teacher, found the main power switch and boom – the whole place lit up in a blaze of lights!\u00a0 Garvin said “I can’t believe we never thought of that…..all those years in the dark stumbling over stuff…”<\/p>\n The new owners moved a lot of the items into a storm cellar at the corner of Gardner and Sunset.\u00a0 The old Pacific Electric ran in a diagonal through the intersection, and just NE next to an old building was a large storm cellar.\u00a0 The couple began hauling magazines out to the Tuesday night antique show at the Great Western Exhibit Center.\u00a0 They did a pretty good business there but eventually they split up and the man rented space in Burbank for a few years.\u00a0 Eventually, he vanished, along with the remains of the popular magazines.<\/p>\n This was only the story of the bowling alley.\u00a0 The main warehouse that Nick Kovach owned was an old supermarket, plus three or more storefronts on Florence Avenue.\u00a0 The places were packed with periodicals, millions of them.\u00a0 Maybe billions.\u00a0 After Kovach died an antique dealer Jerry Aboud and his partner Robert Mann contacted Kovach’s son and made a deal to “Lease” the billions of magazines.\u00a0 Actually, the most valuable things in the warehouse were a set of microfilms that Kovach had made of the early copies of the Panama Star, one of the first newspapers in the Americas.\u00a0 Kovach somehow found the originals in some archive and donated them to the country of Panama.\u00a0 He kept the microfilm masters that he sold to university libraries around the world.\u00a0 The Panamanians loved Kovach, and he was feted on many trips to the country, where he was guest of honor at State\u00a0 dinners.\u00a0 He had given them status as a civilized country. However, when it came to beauty, Mr. Kovach was a failure to the Panamanian men.<\/p>\n Success at magazines, failure as a judge of beauty.<\/p><\/div>\n Mr. Kovach was a judge in the July 1964 Miss Panama contest that was held at the Panama Hilton Hotel in Panama.\u00a0 He and the other judges had voted for a dark beauty, Gloria Navarete.\u00a0 According to Kovach, the audience was rooting for another girl, who he claimed had “spindly bow legs”.\u00a0 When the result was announced the audience started screaming at Kovach and the other Judges, and attacked the stage.\u00a0 Kovach and the others ran for their lives out the back door of the Panama Hilton, with a mob after them.\u00a0 They threw rocks and bottles and even tried to ram Kovach’s car as he raced away.\u00a0 Beauty in Panama is not what the old gringo sees, it is what the macho men of Panama says it is.\u00a0 It took Kovach a while to recoup his honor with the men of Panama.<\/p>\n Bob Mann and Jerry Aboud kept working the Kovach warehouse for about a year.\u00a0 The place was packed to the ceiling, with huge crates stacked full of periodicals.\u00a0 They eventually turned the warehouse over to Jimmy Brucker, who had become half owner of the Burbank Book Castle, and also half owner of the building itself, with its 10,000 sq foot basement.\u00a0 The problem with the Kovach warehouse was that at the time it was located in a gang area near Crenshaw and Florence. It was an old supermarket at 4801 Second Ave., with apartments on the second floor.\u00a0 The building is still there, but now remodeled.\u00a0 It was best to go there early in the morning and be gone by about 3pm.\u00a0 Weekends were especially bad, as the drug dealers were on every corner in the surrounding area, and gunfire was frequent as darkness approached.<\/p>\n Jimmy spent many months in the warehouse, looking through things.\u00a0 Most of the popular titles had long ago been moved to the bowling alley that Mark Trout had gotten early on.\u00a0 A huge quantity of periodicals were things that had no reason to exist, like thousands of copies of the Los Angeles Board of Education news.\u00a0 But there were gems.\u00a0 A storefront next to the supermarket was full of bound periodicals, many great titles in beautiful and sturdy library bindings.\u00a0 Jimmy gave me the keys and told me to start pulling things for the shop.\u00a0 So for over 1 year I went down to the warehouse once a week with Keith Burns and our friend Bruce Cervon, a famous Magician and expert on old magazines.\u00a0 We hauled van loads over to the Book Castle in Burbank, stopping only to fuel up at a fantastic all you could eat Chinese restaurant on Crenshaw.<\/p>\n We found many gems and brought over thousands of periodicals.\u00a0 It was like being in magazine heaven, although it was not easy working with the old wood crates, which had rusty nails sticking out everywhere.\u00a0 In addition, I was also nervous about making too much of a ruckus with the crates, I didn’t want to be swarmed by the millions of plump silverfish that were hiding inside some of the magazines.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After a year or so, Jimmy wanted to move it all into the basement of the Book Castle.\u00a0 We had some long discussions and finally he let me go through the warehouse and mark the crates that were good enough to maybe sell some day.\u00a0 Jimmy’s truck driver, a genial pot-bellied guy named “Big Bob”, would get a local crew and load a semi- truck and haul it out to Burbank, where I would hire another crew to help unload the thousands of magazines pouring in.\u00a0 In the end we brought in thirteen semi-trucks of magazines, completely filling the entire basement of the Book Castle with a billion magazines.\u00a0 It was hard, dirty work, the crates of magazines had layers of dust an inch thick.\u00a0 But the first truck they brought over was the hardest and almost killed us.<\/p>\n Here’s the thing about semi-trucks.\u00a0 They look really solid, like there is no chance of tipping it over.\u00a0 Wrong.\u00a0 The crew at the Kovach warehouse had grossly over-loaded the trucks, like to the ceiling.\u00a0 Thus we learned our first lesson on how to unload a truck that is 20 tons over weight.\u00a0 We started just unloading from the back door of the truck, crate after crate.\u00a0 We should have gone down the center of the truck, leaving the crates on the edges, and then worked our way back.\u00a0 That was the lesson we learned.<\/p>\n Since the first truck was so full, several of us were working inside, and when we reached 1 magazine over the half-way mark,<\/em> the truck flipped up, the back end with the wheels went flying upward, crashing us inside to the front (where the stilts were) and slamming us with 60 pound wood crates full of dusty magazines.\u00a0 \u00a0It was a miracle nobody was killed.\u00a0 Once the dust cleared and we crawled out of the back of the truck we could not believe what had happened.\u00a0 The back wheels were sticking up in the air.\u00a0 There was no tractor attached, it was down at Kovach’s getting another load.\u00a0 Dust and smoke swirled out of the back opening.\u00a0 Birds were landing on top of the trailer.\u00a0 A crowd was gathering.\u00a0 We shouted to the outside crew to bring us a ladder so we could climb down. One of our crew announced that he needed a beer, and he went off to the local bar.\u00a0 We didn’t see him for a week.<\/p>\n Summers in Burbank are hot, and this late afternoon it was near 100 degrees.\u00a0 We were drenched in sweat and magazine dust.\u00a0 We started trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do.\u00a0 About 100 people had gathered around.\u00a0 Mostly they wanted to know how in heck we had accomplished that feat, something nobody had ever seen before.\u00a0 The problem was how were we to get the damn wheels back on the ground.<\/p>\n My friend Stan remembered his high school geometry class.\u00a0 It’s simple he said.\u00a0 We go back into the trailer and carefully start shifting the magazines forward toward the back door.\u00a0 “It’s just like a teeter-totter” he said.\u00a0 When we get the load balanced the wheels will just come easily down to where they were.\u00a0 We just have to be careful.<\/p>\n We got on the ladder and climbed back into the trailer.\u00a0 The dust had settled a little, but with the heat it was still like being in an oven.\u00a0 We formed a chain and gingerly started passing crates one at a time to the back and out to guys on ladders.\u00a0 After this had gone on a while I got nervous and told the guys to take the ladders away and stand back.\u00a0 We now had enough room to slide crates toward the back, trying to judge when the tipping point would come, and the gentle trailer wheels would shift down.\u00a0 We finally reached that point.<\/p>\n Wham! The back of the trailer slammed down without warning.\u00a0 The door of the trailer came down like a guillotine, then back up, then down, then up, crashing along its tracks.\u00a0 Crates tumbled over, we went flying around the inside of the trailer like loose rag dolls.\u00a0 Everything became quiet.\u00a0 Then someone on the outside started to clap and pretty soon a large cheer went up from the crowd of neighbors watching this clown show.\u00a0 “You did it” someone yelled.<\/p>\n We called it a night, lucky to be alive.\u00a0 We all needed a few beers.\u00a0 But we now knew how to unload the next 12 semi-trailers that came in over the summer.\u00a0 We never pulled a stunt like that again!<\/p>\n Coming Part 2:\u00a0 Last Days of the old Magazine shops of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Part 1 – Some Old Magazine Stores and the Secret Magazine Warehouse.\u00a0 By Paul Hunt Back in the 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles still had a few scattered shops that sold old magazines, comics and pulps.\u00a0 They were dusty, piled … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bookstorememories.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/ABC-Mag.jpg?resize=584%2C438\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bookstorememories.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Marlows-Bookshop-scaled.jpg?resize=584%2C756\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bookstorememories.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Secret-Warehouse-1.jpg?resize=584%2C584\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bookstorememories.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/The-Rock-Man-Jack-Garvin-1987.jpg?resize=584%2C756\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bookstorememories.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/Hollywood-Book-Shop-bus-cd.jpg?resize=300%2C185\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bookstorememories.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Nick-Kovach.jpg?resize=563%2C1056\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bookstorememories.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Book-truck-2.jpg?resize=584%2C584\")
<\/p>\n