“Down That Lonely Road”

Young Woman Whose Life Ebbed as She Wrote “Thirteen Cigarettes” Left Empty Purse.  Funeral Plans Pending

 “Look down – look down that lonely road, the hacks all dead in line:  Some give a nickel, some give a dime, to bury dis po’ body o’ mine!”

All ready for the dismal ritual of burial lies the body of the author of those lines – ready for the trip down the lonely road.

And the money – it must come from some place other than the pitifully empty purse that was found in the little attic room at 1625 K street beside the body of the author yesterday morning.

All that is mortal of Miss Draper Gill, romantic booklover, who finally found that in poverty the body shackles the mind to the humdrum of this world, and who broke the shackles with an open gas jet, lies in the Tabler Funeral Home, 828 M street, while friends and relatives busy themselves with the arrangements for her funeral. The arrangements have not been completed.

                                        Lines Written as Life Ebbs.

Miss Gill, whose closest friends were the fanciful figures from between the leaves of books, wrote the above lines as the close of her life, as her final efforts to slash the shackles of poverty that took her too often from her friends of the phantom book world into the every day pursuits of livelihood.

With her was found her story, eloquent in its pathos, telling a tale of “Thirteen Cigarettes,” the “coffin nails” with which she sealed the lid upon the shackling body and with which she hoped to free her intangible self to stay always with her fanciful friends of fiction.

Even as she died in the shabby little room some time yesterday morning, she moved with her fiction friends, this last time as a fictional character of her own creation, as “Carol,” a girl like herself, strangely, though, even in the tale, coming every now and then into the world of real men and women and leaving the fancy world behind.

                                         Left Only Few Pennies

The story she ended with the two lines above, she wrote as gas filled her room and as, all unmindful of the danger to her plans her smoking might constitute, she inhaled puff after puff from the fatal number of cigarettes. As she took the last puff from the last cigarette she laid her story aside, and lay down quietly to await the final shattering of her shackles to this world.

She left only a few pennies, and there is none coming to her from her last place of employment, the book shop of the Woodward & Lothrop department store, for she had on Saturday, the last day she worked, drawn in advance the little pay she had coming to her.
                                         Story of Thirteen Cigarettes

Eloquently, the story of “Carol” and the “Thirteen Cigarettes” tells of the death of all that was mortal of Draper Gill. It follows:

“October 21, 1930
“Thirteen cigarettes.
“The bare attic room bore signs of former occupancy, but none of them sufficiently interesting to fire any one’s imagination. Discolored, once-white walls, the plaster chipped and cracked, and a few nail holes were about all. Situated on the fourth and top floor and partitioned off rom the unfinished attic proper, the room had probably been occupied by careless servants.
“Carol lay prone on a cot in this same room, ostensibly reading, but stopping at intervals to rehearse what had become a very futile philosophy of life – her life.

                                         Termed Coffin Nails

“Just the other day she had read a story entitled ‘Something Will Happen,’ but nothing had in the story. Carol had been more fortunate in the past, and the evil spells of desirable circumstances have always been broken sooner or later. Now it was different. She was 26 and, voluntarily or involuntarily, she herself had closed all avenues of escape. The 13 cigarettes indeed represented the oft-bruited coffin nails. When they were gone and when the ash tray held the thirteenth stub and contributing ashes, Carol’s doom would have been knelled, silently but significantly.”Reviewing events, recent and long past, was not very comforting. Always she had made wrong moves and suffered from the unexpected results. A childish spontaneity had been half smothered during adolescence and thoughtless selfishness coupled with an indefinable weakness of purpose were growing up in its place. Carol recognized the change dolefully and helplessly, and so did very little to remedy it.

“Hovering on the brink of poverty soon loses all semblance of the picturesque and grows very irksome indeed, particularly when expensive tastes and a flair for spending complicates matters. Carol, –at the moment had a few coppers in her purse and nothing really to look forward to except the impossible settlement of large and small debts. That financial status might have ‘roused the fighting blood’ of a huskier vitality, but served only to overwhelm poor Carol quite completely.

                                         Humdrum Routine

“If one demands the pleasantly unexpected of life, and likes the knack of arranging for joyous events, only to find a series of whirlpools circling rapidly from the crest to the depths, it is disappointing, to say the least, and even trifling pleasures can be obtained only through persistent loyalty in the execution of humdrum routine duties, nine-to-six sort of existence, it rouses a perverse in nature, such as Carol’s, and a black mood of rebellion conspires to blind utterly even the instinct of self-preservation.

“Inspiration was necessary to Carol, as much so as the contant goading indispensable in getting beasts of burden to their destinations. She learned to con it from many sources, books and strangers and abstract beauty. The supply gone, she was like a mechanical toy with no one to wind it – powerless.

” ‘Lazy–I fear I’m incurably lazy -quite worthless in fact,’ she mused. It was too bad, for people really expected great things of her, until she, too, was sometimes convinced, but nothing came of it -only this sorry end, that approached as each tobacco-filled cylinder dwindled into gray ash and blackened stub.

“She had done reasoning out of the possible effects of heredity, environment, individuality and incalculable circumstance – they were so hopelessly tangled in a knotted mesh, an eminent psychologist might well hesitate to unravel the skeins.

” ‘Too much purple and yellow in the color scheme,’ was Carol’s whimsical verdict, upon visualizing an untidy basket of interwoven threads of varying hues.

” ‘I must be strong in going,’ was uppermost in her mind. ‘I have gained nothing by lingering so long-and only done others harm-caused them inconvenience, worried the few who have shown concern. Lacking strength for noble deeds, this will offer part compensation, a forfelt to subsequent years that promised similar cycles of non-achievement.’

                                         Voices Farewell

“Upon second thought, ‘If I should fail—‘ but that was too terrible to contemplate. She wouldn’t consider it.
“Farewell to all the ineffectual dreams and aspirations, beautiful and impracticable, glorious and non-existent.
“Farewell to friends – she had only been a burden to them, often stupid and misunderstanding their motives, not troubling to see from their point of view.
“Farewell to relatives, to whom most of her actions had ben inexplicable.
“Farewell to her brother, whose esteem was unwavering, who needed her support, and whom she was leaving.
“Farewell to them all – no remorse now – only regret.
“How slowly they were going. There were eight of them left to mark the passage of time and a few details crying out for attention – they would fill the last moments.

“How cheery the clock sounded, as though pleased with itself for playing so important a part in reckoning Carol’s oblivion. ‘It will not have long to wait, Carol. I wonder?’ was the natural query.

” ‘Perhaps I am writing drivel and silence were better, but I want them to know, even the bit that will be comprehended-it will be of little moment and soon forgotten, anyhow,’ she ended, wondering if that were true.

“The dog-eared phrase: ‘Survival of the fittest,’ Ah, but I do not belong in their ranks, for I have failed completely and they will go on. I wish them well.

    ” ‘Look down–look down, that lonely road, the hacks all dead in line:
“Some give a nickel: some give a dime, to bury dis po’ body o’ mine!'”

Miss Gill’s grandfather, Delancey Gill, is an illustrator with the Smithsonian Institution, and lives at the Rutland Courts Apartments, Seventeenth street and Riggs place. Her uncle, William H. Gill, an engineer with offices in the Transportation Building, Seventeenth and H streets, is handling the arrangements for the funeral.

Editor’s Note:  This article appeared in the Washington D.C. Evening Star on October 23, 1930.  The writer of this interesting obituary is unknown.  The deceased young woman, a grand-daughter of the famous Delancey Gill, worked as a low-paid clerk in the book department of a large department store.  Note today the struggles of workers at amazon.com and other places for a “living” wage.  Too many are still working at what could termed a “death” wage, as illustrated by this poor soul who was penniless and took her own life.

Kelly Goodside’s Tumultuous Adventures in Bookselling

Inspired by Ayn Rand to go West but the trail stopped in Death Valley; From Death Valley to a Book Store on the Sunset Strip; Hiding out in Alaska; The Serial Killer who stole his car; Bookselling days in Southern California.

by Paul Hunt

Ellsworth “Kelly” Goodside could be a little on the dour side. I know because he worked for me for years and he was rarely cheerful, an intellectual mind, but always dodging the most amazing personal disasters that increased his paranoia of the dark clouds passing by overhead on a regular basis. Bookselling is a tough business, especially if you have thrown away the good advice to stay away from it and jumped in the river and found out that the rest of trip would be just trying to keep from drowning. The idyllic thought of swinging in a hammock while your little cruise ship sails down the river of life is nothing more than hallucination between gasps of air and thrashing around the fast moving waters. Some of us are lucky enough to flop on to a sand bar for a few months and get some respite, but the river is always rising and the flood is often only days away.

New York Days With Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand

Kelly Goodside worked as a waiter in New York after his school years, which I know nothing about. He told me that one day he walked by a place where a man named Nathaniel Brandon was speaking. He started to attend these lectures, read Ayn Rand’s books and became a devoted fan of her philosophy, Objectivism, which has been described as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute He eventually was convinced that he should go to the West Coast where there was surely more opportunity. One day he packed up his car with his belongings and his worn copy of Atlas Shrugged and started to drive west to Los Angeles, California to start a new life.

Stop Over at Death Valley

Somehow Kelly ran out of money and a usable vehicle somewhere in Death Valley, where he had stopped for a couple days to take in the scenery. The only place nearby was a tourist attraction called Scotty’s Castle, so fairly desperate to keep from starving in this potentially dangerous desert hell, he applied for a job and was hired. The pay wasn’t much and Kelly had to slog it out for about a year to save enough money to hop a bus and eventually land in Los Angeles. He said he had nightmares of being stuck in Death Valley for the rest of his life, always hot, always thirsty, and always just a few bucks short of the bus fare to get out. I began to see how events like that could make a person a bit on the negative side. In my entire career, I never ran across another individual who actually worked at the famous Scotty’s Castle. Don’t bother thinking you might go there and look around and breath the same dry air as Kelly Goodside did, the Castle is closed for the foreseeable future.

In 2015 an enormous flood washed over the place, followed later by a devastating fire. Scotty’s Castle, now owned by the National Parks Service, is facing decades of work to repair the damages. If Kelly were still alive, maybe he could spin some yarns about his time working there, maybe even tell about the gold treasure mine that Scotty had. Lost tales are now only partially available in a few old tourist pamphlets about Death Valley Scotty. As in many other things, there’s no one left to tell the stories.

From Janitor to Entrepreneur and a Bookstore on the Sunset Strip

When Kelly landed in Los Angeles he needed a job right away. He found one at a place called Preview House on Sunset Blvd. just East of Fairfax. The business had a large auditorium and would show previews of motion pictures, commercials, and other films. The audience was randomly picked but balanced as to the “average” movie-goer. There were buttons on the chairs so the audience could give their opinions of the films and commercials they were viewing. This was important information and feedback for the studios, and sometimes lead to the ending of a movie to be changed because the preview audience did not like it.

Fred Dorsett worked at Preview House with Goodside.  Both became Booksellers.

Kelly worked there and eventually got a contract with the company to supply the janitors to clean up the theater after a show. Oddly enough, another bookseller was also working there at the time: Fred Dorsett. Fred would later open his shop in the Artisan’s Patio on Hollywood Blvd. This time period of the early 1970s was when I was also bookselling as a book scout and finally opening a shop in West Hollywood. You can check out Fred in the articles on Hollywood Blvd. booksellers and also in the story about Charles Bukowski on this website.

Kelly was doing well as an entrepreneur, he ran a crew to clean up the Preview House and saved enough to open a nice book shop at 7525 Sunset Blvd., a few blocks east of Preview House. His determination and hard work was paying off, and he said that he was inspired by Ayn Rand. I met Kelly through Fred Dorset and was a customer of Kelly’s shop, much impressed by the good quality of books that he had for sale.

Kelly Goodside’s Book Store on the Sunset Strip

Photos by Kelly Goodside

 

A couple years later I was driving around West Hollywood looking for yard sales on a bright spring day. I stopped at an apartment sale and was surprised to meet up with Kelly. He was selling everything and moving out of California. He said that his Janitorial company was based on the premise that the employees were “independent contractors”, but the IRS and the State of California disputed that and fined him many thousands of dollars, bankrupting him. (Somewhat of the same fight continues today with Uber and Lyft claiming their drivers are independent contractors and not subject to withholding taxes). In his view, the persecution from the government was just another Atlas Shrugged case.

Hiding Out in Alaska

Kelly closed his book store, selling off the stock, disposed of his personal property, and left for Alaska, where he hoped to find a new life. That lasted a few years. What he found there did not sit well with him: a lot of drinking, months of boredom due to the weather, a lack of an electrified entrepreneur class. He eventually came back to Los Angeles.

Disastrous return  to Los Angeles

By this time, the mid 1980s, I was in Burbank and in the process of opening Best Seller Book Shop, an all-paperback store, under the Book Castle corporation. Kelly had gotten a job delivering telephone directories for Pacific Bell. His car, full of those thick, bulky Yellow Pages, had broken down in North Hollywood, and he wanted to borrow some money to fix what I saw as a really shabby piece of junk. But he needed it for work, so I loaned him the money and he had me drop him off at a run-down motel on the edge of Burbank where he was staying.

A couple weeks later his car was stolen from the Motel parking lot sometime during the night. Kelly was naturally distressed at this “last straw” of bad luck. Without the car he couldn’t deliver the phone directories. I knew him to be a capable bookman, so I hired him to manage the new paperback store we had opened. I also let him stay in one of the extra rooms above the Book Castle that we had fixed up with showers, etc. for our employees who were on hard times. All this helped to pull him out of his depression and the financial hole he was in.

The Serial Killer

Meanwhile, his car appeared in the news. It had been stolen by serial killer Richard Ramirez, and had broken down in East Los Angeles, and when he tried to carjack an Hispanic woman driving another car, some locals apprehended him, beat him senseless and turned him over to the police. This happened in the mid 1980s. And for all the Ripley Believe it or not fans here’s one more weird event. A pretty young woman, obsessed with the killer, came into the Bestseller Book Store when Kelly was running it and paid us to mail a book to her new friend who was in L.A. County jail. A book sent to a prisoner had to be mailed from a legitimate book store, it cannot come from a private person. Kelly took the money and I mailed the book. “What the hell does that young woman see in that vicious killer?” I asked Kelly. He grunted, “sometimes good looks goes forth in life without any brains directing traffic.”

The Final Years

Cliff’s Books, Pasadena

Kelly worked for us at Bestseller and also at Atlantis Book Shop until Redevelopment wiped out Atlantis and our warehouse in one of Burbank’s real estate frauds, tearing down 2 blocks of small business folks and turning the land over to huge developers for $200. I found Kelly a job at Cliff’s Books in Pasadena, which enabled him to survive along with his social security. When Cliff sold out to an amazon.com dealer one day (without telling the employees, like no notice at all, not even 10 minutes) Kelly was again cast out into the darkness. I lost touch with him. He had been considering moving back to New York to live with his brother, I don’t know if that happened or not. Twisting an old saying about soldiers, “Old booksellers never die, they just fade away.” And so Kelly Goodside, bookman to the end, just faded away.

RIP Kelly Goodside.

Last Bookstore to Open in NOHO

Last Bookstore Moving Their On-line Warehouse to NOHO

by Paul Hunt

This will be their new location in a few months, the currant occupant is having a sale of furniture and decorative items.  The Last Bookstore said they could not renew their lease on their Northridge On-line warehouse, so decided to move and open a retail location.

The new location will be at 4437 Lankersheim Blvd., in NOHO, corner of Landale.  It will probably be several months before they can get occupancy and then move in thousands of books.  The good news is that it is not far from the NOHO Metro Station and there is a bus stop on the corner.  There are restaurants in the area, and a Coffee Bean & Leaf across the street.  There is plenty of parking in the area, and it is an attractive location.  They will continue to operate their store in downtown Los Angeles.

 

The Mayme Clayton African-American Library Vanished Without A Trace. A Victim of Despicable L.A. Politics.

The Mysterious Disappearance of Libraries and Museums in Southern California

First Part in a Series
by Paul Hunt

Mayme Clayton with her beloved books

Mayme A. Clayton with her beloved books.

Mayme Agnew Clayton was an African-American woman born in Arkansas on August 4, 1923. At the age of 13 she started collecting books on the history and literature of Blacks in America. She ended up with a collection of about 2 million items and a Library and Museum in Culver City, California. It was a long, tough road for her, but she was incredibly focused and resilient. She died as her Library was opened, but her sons stepped up to fill the void, until mid-2019 when the entire Library and Museum vanished in the midst of the turmoil of L.A.’s rotten politics, heroic patrons, and a shameful Board of Supervisors. Like the fog of war and forgotten battles, piecing together the fragments of the dramatic drive to create a lasting Library for African-American studies has not been easy.

Mayme Clayton was an incredibly busy woman. She raised three sons, worked as a librarian, was involved in golf tournaments, and in every spare moment was out and about searching for books on the literature and history of African-Americans. One of her big collections came from a bookstore we have written about several times on this blog, Universal Books.
Sifting through the few scraps of history of bookstore archives and the fading memories of the last remaining booksellers, the story is both dramatic and inspiring.

Photo by Wayne Braby.

Universal Books came to life on February 25, 1966. The store was founded by Jerry Weinstein and his brother Bob, both of whom had spectacular careers in bookselling in the following decades. The store was a small shop located just east of Vine on the South side of Hollywood Blvd, at 6258. Don’t bother looking around for the location, most of that block was demolished and huge structures now occupy what was once a group of small shops, a hot dog stand, and the wild, dangerous bar called the Crazy Horse.

Jerry Weinstein, a great L.A. Bookman, in full regalia

Bob and Jerry struggled to get the shop going, buying books, putting up shelves and obtaining second-hand fixtures. Money was scarce. The Weinsteins, five brothers, had been running a junk shop opened by their father in South L.A. when they discovered that they could do better with books than all the other stuff. Some of the older booksellers, like Peter Howard encouraged them to focus on second-hand books, and the brothers
went full boar into selling books, along with a sister and the wives, creating a dynasty of book shops in Southern California. It’s a story in itself, full of drama, disasters, and huge success and wealth, but that will have to be written by one of the surviving members some day.

Bob Weinstein lasted about six months at Universal Books. Sales were slow, the shop was on the eastern edge of Hollywood Blvd., a ways from the action near Pickwick Book Shop and the cluster of book stores dotting the street just east of Highland Ave. Bob’s wife got pregnant, and Bob had to bail on the book store and go back to a mainstream job for a while. Jerry fished around for a new partner and found Larry Mullen, a fellow poker player at one of the clubs in Gardena. Jerry introduced Larry to the book business and made him an offer: “Work here at the shop for $100 per week for one year and I’ll make you a partner.” Larry agreed, and his education began as a book dealer.

The story of how Jerry Weinstein stumbled into the African-American book world involves some tragic circumstances, as was related to me by Larry Mullen many decades ago. Here it is, as I remember it: One day a gentlemen pulled up in front of Universal Books with his car jam packed with books. He said he was a landlord of a small bungalow in Venice that he had rented to two guys, one a beatnik and the other a musician. The 1960s were the trailing end of the beatnik days in Southern California, although Venice was a haven, and the influence in many ways is still evident in local libraries, crumbling buildings, poetry and vibes.

The landlord said that the beatnik guy, who collected all the books that he had in the car, had been busted for possession of pot, a somewhat serious offense back in those days. He was sent to jail for some time, and the musician, mostly unemployed, couldn’t pay the rent by himself so he took off for parts unknown. The Landlord gathered up all the books and pamphlets and loaded his car, hoping to sell the books and recoup lost rent. Jerry rummaged through the load, and was not immediately impressed. The books, many old and scarce, were all on Black history and literature, some going back to slave days. He was not familiar with the subject, but one thing about Jerry, he had instinct for books. He also knew that the Landlord had been trying to flog the books all over Hollywood, and Universal Books, sitting just east of Vine, was the last stop. East of Argyle was mostly desolate land in a literary sense. He was Mr. Landlord’s last chance.

So Jerry made the guy an offer, not based on the value of the books, which he did not even know at the time, but based on how much money was in his pocket at the moment, the cash drawer and bank account being drained by the Gardena card parlors. I don’t know what he paid for it, but let’s just say it was one of Jerry’s most spectacular buys. The frustrated Landlord was probably glad to get a few hundred bucks out of the deal, the economy slow, and he was also getting rid of a load of debris from the house. My thoughts at the time were to not only get the books but go back to the house and see what remained of rare pamphlets, documents, broadsides and miscellaneous strewn about. Hearing this story left an impression on me, I did exactly that several times in years to come, even telling landlords I would sweep up the debris “broom clean” if I could have the remaining items.

Jerry started to work on the book collection right away, getting together a catalog that was called “The Negro in America and Africa, a Choice Collection of Books by or about the Black Man.” The catalog was labeled “Black Literature Catalog #121.” I have a copy of this now rare catalog, and wondered if this was the first catalog Jerry put out or did he really have 120 earlier ones? According to Bob Weinstein, Jerry just picked a number, it was actually his first catalog, but Jerry wanted the librarians to think that he had been in business for some time and was not a novice.

 

The catalog was wonderful in content. Although just typewritten and offset printed as a pamphlet, many of the items dated back to the nineteenth century and some to Civil War and early times. The prices, with today’s perspective, were very reasonable. If I can figure out how to do it, I would like to make it into a .pdf for folks to use as reference.
Needless to say, the catalog was a smashing success and mostly sold out. The timing was perfect, universities across America were just beginning to establish ethnic studies programs, and it was important to have reference works to back them up.

With money coming in and orders piling up, Jerry went on the road, looking to find duplicates to fill orders and to scoop up any of the black literature and history he could find. As I have written about before, during the LBJ’s Urban Renewal program in the large cities across the country, many thousands of old buildings were torn down, many of these being the home of old established used book stores, usually in lower rent districts. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw major used book stores closing down forever, and liquidating their stock of books at bargain prices. Jerry hit many of these stores and shipped back his book purchases to Universal so Larry could send them out to waiting customers.

Meanwhile, Mayme Clayton was gathering books. She was in and out of many of the Hollywood Bookstores in the late 1960s, including Universal, and she most likely purchased a number of books from Jerry and Larry. In November of 1969 the L.A. Free University hosted Clayton “of the UCLA Law Library” to give a talk. Around 1970 UCLA asked her to assemble a collection of books on African-American literature and history. Funds were lacking to buy any sort of rare items and they were at least keen to buy some of the new books being published at the time. In the Summer of 1971 UCLA sent Mayme Clayton to Africa to look for books in Libraries there on the subject of African-American interest. She found very little in the countries she went to, and said that those books were almost non-existent in the libraries of African nations.

In the fall of 1971 she returned to Los Angeles and took a job working at Universal Books for $2 an hour. She had realized that although being a librarian was a good solid job, her real goal was to assemble a world class collection, a Library and Museum that would tell the story of Black people in America. She decided that Universal Books was at the time the leading book shop in the West Coast that was cataloging and selling books on Black subjects, so she decided to learn the ropes so she could open her own shop or Library some day.

The situation at Universal Books at that time was full of chaos and drama, as usual. Jerry and Larry had both been playing way too much at the Gardena Poker Clubs. Larry told me that they finally both realized that they had to pay attention to the business, so they made a deal. They would both quit gambling and devote themselves to be successful booksellers. If either party was caught gambling, he would have to sell the business to the other partner. Jerry got caught and had to sell the store to Larry Mullen. Larry, short of capital, took in a partner named Ed Withrow, a customer of the shop, well-to-do, and a collector of art books.

I met Ed Withrow in 1979 when I opened my shop in West Hollywood, the Paperback Jack Book Store. Ed was a good customer, a gentle man and very knowledgeable about books. We both knew Larry and Ed told me about his experience as a partner at Universal that lasted about a year. Ed was disappointed in the partnership and with Larry, and asked to be bought out. Larry scrambled around and brought in Jules Manasseh in 1972. Ed Winthrop was tragically murdered around 1980. He had owned some apartments and was refurbishing one of the units and went to work on the unit one night, evidently surprising some gang bangers who had broken in to steal his tools. Another shocking, senseless murder, all too common in the crime-ridden streets of Los Angeles.

By 1972, not only was Mayme Clayton working at Universal part time, evidently using the name “Mae Phillips” to protect her job as a librarian, but also working there were Mark Sailor and Melvin Guptin. Mark wrote a wonderful story about his experiences at Universal, published here at BookstoreMemories.com. I’ll put the link to it down at the end of this story. He called it the Lost Book World East of Vine. Mark Sailor was also involved with cataloging the Black Americana that the store continued to specialize in.

On December 4, 1973, the L.A. Times ran an article about Mayme Clayton, who had opened a bookstore in her remodeled garage behind her house at 3617 Montclair, South Los Angeles. The shop, called Third World Ethnic Bookstore, stocked over 3,000 volumes.

In 1974, Mayme put up the money to become a partner with Jules Manasseh, who had bought out Larry Mullen. The partnership didn’t last long, only a few months. She claimed the owner “lost profits at the horse races”, and that on one especially bad day lost all the business money. She ended the partnership, and took all the stock of books on African-American history, approximately 4,000 volumes, as settlement. Universal Books was pretty much out of the arena of books on Black History.

1975 was a busy year for Mayme Clayton. She was appointed to the staff of the DOVES Project, Dedicated Older Volunteers in Educational Services. She recruited seniors to volunteer to help at the local Watts elementary, junior and high schools.

In November of 1975 she changed the name of her bookstore to The Western Black Research Center. A newspaper article stated that Clayton would give tours of her library on Saturdays between Noon and 1pm. She also in the late 1970s and early 1980s was instrumental in putting on Celebrity Golf tournaments for African-American golfers.

By 1999 Mayme hosted a day long African-American Film Festival at Cal State Northridge. The films were from her collection at the Western Black Research Center. She had continued over the years to produce film festivals and lectures on African-American history and literature, and had purchased archives of photographs from failed magazines and newspapers, and expanded her collection at her garage until it was packed. The publicity she generated along the way finally led to a breakthrough in Culver City when a lease was signed in 2006 to open a Library and Museum at the old Courthouse at 4130 Overland Avenue, Culver City.

Her dream partially realized, sadly Mayme Clayton died on October 13, 2006.

Mayme painted by her son Avery Clayton

Mayme’s son Avery Clayton took over the job of building out the Library. In 2007 he changed the name from Western Black Research Center to The Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum (MCLM). Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, Supervisor of the Second District, leased the old Courthouse to the MCLM for one dollar a year. The property in older times had been owned by Culver City, and the Council and Mayor were behind the Library and celebrated that Clayton’s Collection, which had grown from 3,000 items to around 2 million items, was going to be the largest African-American collection in the Western United States. It put Culver City on the Cultural map, along with the movie studios and art galleries.

Avery Clayton

Avery Clayton was busy with the Library. In January 2009 he loaned the Huntington Library in San Marino, one of the most prestigious Libraries in the World, a group of items from the Clayton collection for a display called “Central Avenue and Beyond. The Harlem Renaissance in Los Angeles.” The Museum was attracting a lot of attention. A local photographer and book collector named Mosiah Kennard introduced renowned L.A. bookseller and filmmaker Arnold Herr to Avery Clayton. Arnold was hired to make a documentary about the MCLM, which he did. It was an excellent film, and was shown at the Museum, but has since vanished, possibly still in the MCLM archives, wherever that is.

On Thanksgiving Day 2009 Avery Clayton died at his home in Culver City. He was too young and his untimely death was a blow to the Museum. The cause of death was not known or revealed if indeed known. He had previously had a kidney transplant, so possibly that had something to do with his passing. His brother Lloyd Clayton took over the reins of the MCLM. He tried to pull things together, putting on events and expanding Library services to the local community. Many volunteers worked at the location which became a Mecca to the African-American community on the West Coast. But storm clouds were brewing, and an outrageous display of dirty politics was closing in, leading to the destruction and disappearance of this invaluable Library.

Lloyd Clayton

At an event at the MCLM on November 9th, 2018, which was to celebrate the creation of a cultural corridor in Culver City, former City Councilman Jim Clarke oddly stood up with some “bad news”. He said that he heard that Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas had decided to evict the Library and replace it with a “constituent center.” This was shocking to Lloyd Clayton and the folks at the event, who could not believe that Ridley-Thomas would do something like that. Clarke said Ridley-Thomas wanted them out by the end of the year.

Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas evicted the MCLM

Then a couple weeks later, at the annual stakeholder meeting of the MCLM on November 20, the Senior Deputy for Ridley-Thomas showed up and said that the library had to get out, that the building needed repairs and that part of the roof had collapsed. It turned out that due to a small leak in part of the building a few ceiling tiles had fallen down. The spokeswoman also ranted on that the MCLM had not paid rent for years, and that the building is worth $93,000 per month. Forgetting that the Museum had an agreement with the County for a token rent of $1 per year and that the whole reason for the Library and Museum to be in the building was to provide the books, films, documents and archives to enrich the community. Over and over, I have observed that malicious bureaucrats will use this excuse to close down libraries: “The Library isn’t making any money,” they whine. Forgetting, of course, that libraries and museums usually don’t make money, they exist for cultural enrichment and benefit to the community.

On April 18, 2019 the MCLM is officially evicted by Ridley-Thomas, L.A. County’s powerful Supervisor.

Earl Offari Hutchinson led the fight to save the Library

This provoked an outrage from the community. Earl Offari Hutchinson, a radio personality and community leader, launched a vigorous campaign to save the MCLM. Starting on the 28 of April he held several demonstrations in front of the Library. He was supported by former Supervisor Yvonne Burke and Mayor Wells of Culver City. Hutchnson gathered a lot of support and wondered how one man (Ridley-Thomas) could get away with doing something like this with no public support. Despite petitions, phone calls, and letters from Culver City officials protesting this outrage, the Supervisors remained silent. The petitions and the community were totally ignored, and the County did not even have the courtesy to answer letters from local officials and residents.

In July the MCLM was boxed up and moved out. Blurbs in local newspapers claimed that Cal State University Dominguez Hills had made a deal to take the entire collection and merge it into their campus library. The MCLM story faded from view at this point. Covid hit, the Lockdowns, the vaccine controversies, the economic stagnation. The Library was forgotten. Libraries, churches and meetings were banned by the County.

A couple of years went by. When I tried to find where the Library had moved to, I hit a dead-end. The Librarian at CSUDH told me that they had been expecting the collection but it had never showed up. The Library, with its 2 million books, films, and documents had vanished.

And now we are presented with a strange coincidence. The building at 4130 Overland, former home of the MCLM, is now occupied by big pharma and big medicine. A huge non-profit called BioscienceLA is ensconced in the building. This non-profit was founded in 2018, just at the time Ridley-Thomas was first talking about evicting the MCLM. What a coincidence! Their brochure says “Launched with financial support from founding sponsors representing government, industry and philanthropic sectors, all of whom endorse the potential of Los Angeles to become a major West Coast life sciences innovation hub.”

I dropped by to see for myself, but the doors are locked to outsiders. A brochure was passed through a small cracked open door by a woman who didn’t want to answer any questions. The building is used as a meeting hub, so executives in the BioLA community can have a place to meet and not have to drive all over LA. They also recruit and train young students for placement in the medical companies and university medical systems.

Looking back through the postings of Urbanize Los Angeles and other websites reveals some interesting financial claims.

2019 – A news post claims BioLA received 4 million dollars to remodel the building on Overland. The money came from “Discretionary Funds” of the Second Supervisorial District (Ridley-Thomas). They also received a 5 year lease gratis, with an option for three five year extensions. (It was not stated whether the extensions were also gratis, or if there would be actual rent).

2020 – BioscienceLA’s “Biofutures Program” receives a 1 million dollar grant from Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.

2021 – A news post says that “L.A. Builds a Bioscience Hub to Challenge Biotech Scene in San Diego and Boston”. The article claims that L.A. County had invested 10 million dollars in the project.

2021 – October 13 – Mark Ridley Thomas charged in a bribery and fraud scheme by a Federal Grand Jury. This was a scheme involving his son and the University of Southern California.

2023 – March 30 – Ridley-Thomas Convicted of Bribery, Conspiracy and Mail Fraud.

2023 – August 28th Ridley-Thomas Sentenced to 3 1/2 years in Prison. The Department of Justice never mentioned anything about the MCLM’s eviction and his relationship to BioscienceLA and his funding.

This story is not finished. There is more to come, soon.

Rest in Peace:
Mayme A. Clayton
Avery Clayton
Jerry Weinstein
Ed Winthrup
Mark Sailor
Melvin Guptin
Avery Mosiah Kennard

Thank you all for reading this. Any comments, corrections, or thoughts, please send them to bookman451@gmail.com. PH

Hollywood’s Lost Book World East of Vine Click Here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Amazon Controls The Book World

The Secret of “Closed Generic Strings” and the Magic of the Powerful Words They Hide in Their Vault

The most powerful word in the book world is “Book”. It is owned by Amazon. They also own “Author”, “Buy”, “Pay”, “Prime”.
“Song”, “Tunes”, “Wow”, and maybe “Read”.

A Journey into History and Magic by Paul Hunt

The used and antiquarian book business began to change by 2013, into something that looks a lot different today. The 1970’s -1990s were probably the golden years for booksellers in Southern California, for both new and used books. In the 1970s Hollywood Blvd. was packed with bookstores. Pickwick Book Shop anchored the western end of the Street and book stores, back-issue magazine stores, and newsstands spread east to around Argyle Ave. What happened?

A lot of factors went into the turbulent cultural change. Technology and the Internet certainly were, at the end of the millennium, the basic factors. There were others, like an escalating spiral of high rents, the crime wave that hit Hollywood when the Mayor and the big Donkeys decided to push through a “Redevelopment” scam that would work as a regional part of the Great Society’s Urban Renewal, or as the great Jack LeVan said, “Urban Ruin-all”. I was just getting into the used book business in the 1960s when LBJ’s program started to gut out the centers of many major cities across the country, which meant that thousands of older buildings were torn down and hundreds of bookstores were tanked in the process. The same thing happened in Los Angeles.

There were bookstores in downtown Los Angeles and many had spread west on 6th Street in the 1930s. Urban Renewal pushed the survivors westward. Dawson’s ended up on Larchmont, Zeitlin settled into a barn on La Cienega, a few like Caravan managed to hang on until recent times. Hollywood Blvd had book stores from the 1920s on up, and became the mecca of literature by the 1960s.

When high rents and high crime began to force book stores out of Hollywood, many went to Westwood and further to Santa Monica. Others moved to Burbank’s old Outdoor Mall. Unfortunately, the rents continued to climb and the internet experienced massive growth.

There is now little left of the once plentiful book and magazine stores. It was a wipe-out, a cultural destruction of enormous consequences, and continues until today. Society had opened up the floodgates of unlimited immigration which, with redevelopment, drove rents up, while the trillions in printing press money pounded the value of the dollar down. The culture, bookstores, art galleries, small theaters, newspapers, magazines, all buckled under the pressure and many collapsed.

From this wasteland of reality emerged a new world. It is a world that is in the ethos, somewhere in time and space, sometimes called “the cloud”, or generally, “the internet”. It it invisible until you get a device that will connect you to the ethereal realm and make it visible to you. Without a device, you cannot see or hear the new world. It is a new land, with domains instead of cities. It rules commerce and will soon rule the world with the introduction of “artificial intelligence”. And if something ever happens to shatter the connection, humanity will be stripped of everything.

In 1994 Jeff Bezos founded an on-line bookselling company called Cadabra
(you know, like Abracadabra, the old magic word). The usage of the word Abracadabra goes back to the late 1600s. It is said to have originated in the Balkins, and may be traced back to Gnostic teachings and a cabalistic name for Almighty God. It is used in magic and magik, a term meaning a transition, something that is happening, something magical: a rabbit is pulled out of a hat.

Bezos decided early on that just the word Cadabra sounded too much like “cadaver” so he came up with “amazon” named after a legendary race of warrior women living somewhere at the edge of the world. Bezos was into words of power and he soon devised a plan to control the mighty words so that nobody else could use them, in effect pulling them from use in the domains of the internet, the new territory of time and space, and by keeping them locked in his vault in the “cloud”, he would deprive any competitor from using them. If this sounds esoteric, it is.

Bezos is also a Wall Street guy, and worked at a hedge fund, so he had contacts to get financing, to launch an IPO, to sell corporate bonds, etc. He officially launched amazon.com on July 6, 1995. In 1997 he launched his IPO with 3 million shares of stock at $18 per share. The stock closed at $23.25, and Amazon made 54 million dollars in one day, much more than selling books. The stock is now over $174 per share. The market cap for Amazon is now $1.81 Trillion Dollars.  

The new Top Level Domains (TLD)

Around 2012 there began a heated discussion and competition among various companies and persons about the subject of TLDs and gTLDs, (Generic Top Level Domains). The public had been aware of .com, .org, .biz, etc., the original top level domains that most folks were using back in the turn of the century. Even today, .com is still the most popular domain designation. The problem for many folks is that all the “good” and powerful and valuable names have been taken. This has happened in the book business also. For instance, type in book.com. You can’t get this for your domain, because it is actually owned by Barnes and Noble, and book.com will resolve to barnesandnoble.com. The big guys have sucked up all the good .com names.

So the pressure was for the non-profits who run the internet, like ICANN, to make other top level domains, so that a person or company could, for instance have book.academy, or some other top level domain. Book.academy for example, may not be as good as book.com, but it is not bad, assuming someone does not already have it. A great website is TLD-list.com, where you can see an alphabetical list of all top level domains, and if they are active, a chart comparing prices from various registries. Pay particular attention to the “renewal” fee, because unlike .com which is very reasonable, some TLDs have low first year entrance fees but huge renewal fees for year two and so on. You will also notice that a fair amount of the listed TLDs are “not available”.

Closed Generic Strings

There was a private auction in November of 2014 by ICANN of their new generic top level domains (gTLDs). Amazon was a big winner at this auction, bidding through a shadowy branch of theirs in Luxembourg, with an international domain consultant company, and of course, a suitcase full of money to put up the millions of dollars it would need to put the Bezos plan of action into reality. For some time before the auction, there was a lot of debate, because Amazon was accused of planning to buy up certain gTLDs and then keep them in a vault and not release them for use. This is called holding Closed Generic Strings, a technical term. This was exactly the plan that Bezos had, because the words are powerful, and it was worth untold millions to snag them and keep them from use by competitors.

Here’s a few of the great gTLDs that Amazon owns: .book, .buy, .author, .now, .pay, .prime, .song, .tunes, .wow, and possibly .read. It is hard to track these down, but there’s a partial list. The most important to our book world discussion are .book, .author, and .read. These powerful words are in Amazon’s vault, and have been for years. Despite these having an original rule that whoever buys them can only have them for 10 years, Amazon seems to have figured out how to keep these forever. It’s like when Disney managed to bludgeon the copyright laws of the United States so they could keep Mickey Mouse for additional years. Money, power, and Wall Street talk the big talk.

By using a generic name, like book, we could have potentially thousands of booksellers getting together and registering their names like PickwickBookShop.book, or Antiquarian.book. If the renewal rate was reasonable, a lot of book folks, publishers, writers, and booksellers would be using .book as their domain. But Bezos does not want the competition.

The same is true of .author, another generic name that Amazon has locked up. Many authors and writers would love to have their name and use the gTLD of .author. Example johnsmith.author. The same would be true of .read, but this would appeal to an even broader audience.

It is not enough for Amazon to control the new book market. They also control a huge part of the used book market. And although they have large numbers of independent sellers, they also have ways of putting their own used books first. They also own Abebooks.com, the largest formerly independent platform for used books. Abebooks owns bookfinder, a large site to search for books. Amazon also owns Goodreads.com, a huge site that does book reviews; IMDB.com which houses all the information about films; Twitch.com, a huge gaming site, and through other entities such web sites as Wag.com (pet supplies), Soap.com (household needs), Diapers.com (baby supplies), and BeautyBar.com (cosmetics) and a whole lot more. Amazon has been known to buy up smaller competitor’s sites and then close them.

Before ICANN handed over these powerful names to Amazon, there were a lot of negative comments and warnings from other competitors and community watchdog groups, all ignored, but here is a sampling below:

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Heather Dryden, an Australian consumer advocate: the applicant is “seeking exclusive access to a common generic string .. that relates to a broad market sector,” which Ms. Dryden notes could have unintended consequences and a negative impact on competition. Amazon was subject to a large amount of identical warnings.

**********

Barnes and Noble sent a scathing letter:

Barnes & Noble, Inc. submits this letter to urge ICANN to deny Amazon.com’s application to purchase several top level domains (TLDs), most notably .book, .read and .author (collectively the “Book TLDs”). Amazon, the dominant player in the book industry, should not be allowed to control the Book TLDs, which would enable them to control generic industry terms in a closed fashion with disastrous consequences not only for bookselling but for the American public. If Amazon, which controls approximately 60% of the market for eBooks and 25% of the physical book market, were granted the exclusive use of .book, .read and .author, Amazon would use the control of these TLDs to stifle competition in the bookselling and publishing industries, which are critical to the future of copyrighted expression in the United States.

Amazon’s ownership would also threaten the openness and freedom of the internet and would have harmful consequences for internet users worldwide. When ICANN announced its plan to increase the number of TLDs available on the Domain Name System, one of its stated goals was to enhance competition and consumer choice. However, if the Book TLDs applications are granted to Amazon, no bookseller or publisher other than Amazon will be able to register second-level domain names in .book, .read and .author without Amazon’s approval, leaving Amazon free to exclude competitors and exploit the generic Book TLDs for its sole benefit

(It must be noted that although I agree with Barnes and Noble’s argument, they themselves have a lock on book.com.)

**********

The Booksellers Association of Switzerland:

In the case of a closed generic TLD like .books, the exclusivity granted to the winning applicant would de facto strengthen the position of a single big operator in the book industry and would be detrimental to the industry as a whole

There were many more comments against Amazon, including a lot of competitors who applied for the powerful generic names. They were all rejected.

**********

And so Jeff Bezos said “abacadabra” and now out of the ethereal universe comes to his vault .book, .author, .pay, .now, .prime, .buy, .song, .tunes, and more. It’s magic, folks, and for these powerful words that cannot be touched or used by the unwashed masses, he traded paper tokens produced with more magic by the Federal Reserve. There is a veil over our heads, and it’s hard to peep through the fabric to see the unseen universe and the magik, magic, mystery, prestidigitation, wizardry, sorcery and incantation involved.

Hey, what about .page? Oh, that’s owned by google.com. The good news is that it is available and very reasonable to renew. So kudos to google, and hope this helps some folks travel down their path to finding their very own domain. Just remember, you can trade your tokens to rent it, but you can never actually “own” it. It is only “real” in the alternate universe of the “internet”, and controlled by an entity that used to be referred to as the “I Am” in this world, now called the “I Can” or ICANN in the world of the magical universe.

The Future of Book Shops

What is the Future of American Book Shops?

by Paul Hunt

The dystopian end for literacy.  The very last stage of the retail book business will be Book Tents on sidewalks in the big cities as the huge skyscrapers become empty due to high rent and finally to the massive CME from the Sun.  With 300,000 mainly homeless, destitute, and uneducated people pouring over the border every month, does anybody actually believe that there’s going to be less people living on the streets?  When the internet goes down get ready to shop for books on the sidewalks.

It looks like American society has abandoned it’s own culture.  The demise of bookstores, art galleries and small theaters are sure signs of the decay. Here’s the report card for reading in California schools from CAreads.org:

Reading is the most fundamental skill children must learn to succeed in school and in life.  But today, half of California’s students do not read at grade level.  What’s worse, among low-income students of color, over 65% read below grade level.  Few ever catch up.

Sad news for anyone thinking about trying to sell a book in the future. The trend is also showing up at libraries.  I’ve noticed lately that most libraries have changed their mix, which is now maybe 40% books, 40% audio and video and 20% computers.

Let me know what YOU think.  I have a few ideas for solutions, but I’ll save them until Hollywood starts issuing the book tents with small solar panels to power lights inside.  And a fluffy pillow for an old guy to sit on.

The Book To Get For Holiday Reading

Noel Hart’s Book about Cosmopolitan Book Shop is a hit with book lovers!

And That Was Only The Front Cover

Noel Hart – And That Was Only the Front Counter: Working in the Used Book Business in Los Angeles.
Contains over 400 pages crammed with intensity from the trenches of the used book business in Los Angeles. This is a SIGNED LIMITED EDITION, which includes a piece of the bookshop tipped in! This is unique to each copy, a portion of a page printed in 1753, sourced from Cosmopolitan Bookshop in Hollywood. Each copy is SIGNED in full by Australian author Noel Hart in black ink on title page. Introductory note by Arnold M. Herr. Cover artwork by Rom Anthonis. This is a NON-FICTION book.
Rear cover blurb: “Melrose Avenue, Hollywood. Around the turn of the millennium. A classic secondhand bookshop, dusty and dirty, shabby with age and happenstance, packed tight with decades of stagnant accumulation. So messy it resembles the aftermath of a major earthquake. Bring a shovel, dig for treasures! Crackly radio jazz can be heard emanating from somewhere. Michael Jackson browses porn in one aisle; a homeless man sleeps on the floor in another; a transvestite hooker works the trade in a secluded corner behind a stack of boxes; a serious collector collates rare seventeenth-century antiquarian volumes near the front counter; a frenetic movie set decorator rents books throughout. All the while at the center of the maelstrom sits 80-year-old owner Eli Goodman, a ruminative, philosophical, New York-born Jew, intelligent and funny, an obsessive hoarder to the extreme, a caricature character who distinctly resembles Woody Allen dropped into a Marx Brothers movie, and who happens to live in a decrepit hovel at the back of the bookshop. For fifty years Eli has presided over the famous and infamous, the bibliophiles, researchers, collectors, decorators, actors, models, musicians, hipsters, the scholarly, shady, and insane, all congealed into a conglomerate crush at Cosmopolitan Bookshop. Longtime store manager Noel Hart, an Australian, captures it all, stuffs it into a mind-blender, then spills it out onto the page. NOTE: What began as a talk given to the Australian Book Collectors’ Society in 2018, then subsequently published verbatim in their journal in 2019, has now been expanded into a book-length narrative by Noel Hart, who managed Cosmopolitan Bookshop in Los Angeles for ten years.”
Printed in Australia. Published in 2023 by Bookwood Press, Melbourne.

Noel hard at work at Cosmopolitan Book Shop

To order a copy, Click Here.

Libraries in Gaza Bombed Into Rubble

The Story of A Book Found Under Ruins

The Edward Said Public Library

The following video, a talk by Mosab Abu Toha, is about how he founded the Edward Said Public Library.  With an introduction by Noam Chomsky.  Please watch this video first for background information.

If you saw the video above, you will then be disturbed to read the FB post I retrieved, that Mosab and his family, fleeing from the terrors of the massive bombings of Gaza, has been taken and possibly killed by the IDF.  The slaughter of civilians is so shocking it is beyond words.

So much for education and libraries in occupied areas of Israel.  After watching the video of Mosab describing the problems of even receiving books for his library, the situation in Gaza becomes more illuminated and certainly pathetic.  Previous bombings destroyed libraries, and no doubt the present massive destruction has wiped out all remaining libraries, along with the 20,000 civilians killed so far.  Here’s a few photos of past and present destruction.

I will publish further updates as I find them.  If anyone has any information about the present status of the libraries and book shops in Gaza please contact me.

Update:  The Islamic University in Gaza and its library, founded in 1978 is completely destroyed according to reports on Aljazeera.  The President of the University and his family were killed yesterday by their home being bombed in one of the refugee camps, according to another report.

Beatology New Bookstore Opens in Downtown Los Angeles

Broadway Goes Beat and Pop Culture

by John Aes-Nihil

Broadway’s New Books Shop

Beatology Vintage/Aes-Nihil Productions Super Store 737 S. Broadway Los
Angles open daily from 10AM to 7PM.  Featuring huge collection of Books,
Records, Tapes, Videos, Hi Fashion, Low Fashion the Photography of
Aes-Nihil-Sun Ra, Stooges, VU, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg,
John Waters, NYC Punk Bands,  and the Aes-Nihil Collection of Sharon
Tate photos from original transparencies & slides.   The only truly
glamorous store left in Los Angeles, amidst the Ultimate Collection of
Remaining Movie Palaces.

Books, collectible and scarce. This Beat’s for you.

UPDATE April 2024 – Sorry to say Book Store Closed Forever!