I remember.

I still have my memory. Most of it. Some of it.

Partly because early on I could read, still can, and can more now that I’m retired, and not just tired again, and not re-tired like a re-tread.

I used to read books, and bought them because.

Because

There used to be bookstores.

And libraries. They had books. That’s where the books were, even more than I had, and I had a lot. At the library you could read them there free, or check them out and take them home, read them up and take them back, get another batch, and if you lost one, you could pay for a replacement. Unless it was old and used up and they were going to delete it anyway so you saved them the trouble and you didn’t have to pay.

If the book was lost and not too used, you could pay or go to the bookstore and buy a replacement for less.

There used to be bookstores.

I especially liked used bookstores because they cost less and I didn’t hardly have any money, and if you were buying the replacement for a book you lost and it still had some life left in it and probably was hardly used anyway because almost nobody in those days read the way I did, the library would look it over and say, “OK.” Because they didn’t want to lose a good customer like me.

I can’t say it often enough.

There used to be bookstores.

Now we have the internet.

Bookstores were all over the place. I tried to go to every one, because I loved to read, and books were sacred.

They say there’s nothing like reading a book in person, and I concur. You feel the pages, the weight of the book, the heft, the spine, the binding either sewed or glued, you can turn the pages back to earlier whenever you want.

You can smooth your hand across a page and caress the words and stroke the letters. You can slide your finger to know where you are and you don’t lose your place. Books are tactile, to the hand and to the mind.

Books have that certain book smell of presence, and you can smell it when you enter any bookstore. The internet doesn’t smell.

That’s why

There used to be bookstores.

They spread the words.

I was going to have one, always wanted to, never did, for at least three reasons, three minimum unmet requirements.

First, a good location. Somewhere big enough to hold my collection of 60,000, and big enough to hold everything else, because Shirley loved everything and collected it and we could sell it and we would have.

Second, affordable enough, which means cheap rent, because we weren’t rich, never were, and it takes money to do anything, especially these days, where they talk about the painful choices we should never have to choose between, like rent for the house or food on the table.

Third, a place people would come to. Somewhere to park or walk to, and hopefully a neighborhood where people read and could become steady customers, like a town with a college.

There are more reasons, but three are enough to explain why.

There used to be bookstores, and I was not one of them.

As I was saying, or was about to say, there used to be bookstores that I miss like extracted teeth.

In Riverside in the ‘60s, there was Joseph’s. Just down the street on the same side as Stage One, where I worked evenings (of course) as Assistant Manager.

Joseph’s had a street-level entrance but was mostly downstairs like an underground bunker. That’s where the books were. You turned on the lights and could browse for hours. When you’re young, you can find the time. Of course I bought books. Joseph was already pretty old, and wasn’t getting any younger.

Then, around the corner and down the street to the left on the right, there was a little alley, a door like a side entrance, and a store with rows and shelves, and stairs leading down to a lower level, just like Joseph’s, with books that could fill a warehouse. Years later, they closed that part because the government said it wasn’t sure if it was safe. So much of Riverside was underground in those days. Even the Mission Inn had catacombs.

It was probably a holdover from the days of Prohibition and the hidden Speakeasies, not unlike the hidden rooms behind the fireplace on the Underground Railroad.

Even UCR had a campus bookstore where we bought our textbooks, and they took special orders.

When we moved to Altadena and bought our house, there were bookstores all over Pasadena which is a college town with Caltech and PCC, and Occidental down the street in Eagle Rock. The President went there. At that time he was called Barry.

My favorite go-to for years was Broughton’s, on Lake Avenue, just above Colorado Blvd. He had a high roof, floor-to-ceiling shelves, and ladders. He also had records, a few long play, but mostly the old 78s, sometimes one side only, those heavy black breakable disks with the deep grooves that needed a special needle, a stylus sometimes made of pointed steel that wore out and had to be replaced after so many hours of play. You could buy them in packs. The needles were available at Canterbury Records around the corner.

I bought books (of course), browsed Broughton’s collection, climbed the ladders, studied his method of organization, by content selection, I hung out, got to know the old guy, and thought of him as a friend. Booksellers, even incipient ones like me, are a brotherhood.

I remember vividly, after the big earthquake (was it the Northridge one?) tore the wall off Aunt Jessie’s apartment in Sylmar and she came to live with us because we had a big house, I went to visit Broughton’s the day after. Pasadena was within the radius of destruction, there was damage in the town, and I walked into rubble like London in the Blitz. Broughton was in tears, bookshelves toppled, books scattered, and he was sweeping up the shards of his beloved 78 rpm records like the broken heart of history.

He’d pick up a shattered piece, read the label, and cry from the memory. I cried too, because I loved records the way I loved books, relieved that my own collection of 78s had escaped disaster. I had strapped them to the shelf.

Some of his records were very old, first pressings, maybe the only copy in existence, and we both cried at the loss, like the Library of Alexandria where burned history disappeared beyond recovery. I helped Broughton sweep up the floor.

Broughton closed down the store, the building was quarantined as unsafe, and he pulled up stakes and moved to Colorado Blvd. Book Row, where used bookstores lined up, sometimes adjacent, and added his name to the list, like Cliff’s Books, not exactly a rival, but a colleague in the trade. “If we don’t have it, try next door.”

Broughton was revered, respected, and beloved, but so was Cliff. Cliff’s Books was also iconic, had just about as many books on floor-to-ceiling shelves, and upstairs a little locked room with a window for the rare books collection, unlocked by special permission and visited under supervision. I couldn’t afford even a look.

Across the street was another beloved used bookstore, with cats that prowled and rubbed your legs, allowed behaving dogs under cat supervision to enter and lie down by their masters who sat on the couch for that purpose in the central reading area, books arranged and stacked on the coffee table and end tables, and they read for hours while the dog slept, as long as they liked, and the owner brought them coffee or tea and discussed the newest publications which he had read as advance copies, and the older classics that everybody loves. Yes,

There used to be bookstores.

And of course there were new bookstores too. Some are still here, but in jeopardy. Vroman’s is Top of the List. Proud family name, wide selection, even small and local publishers, book clubs, stationery and fountain pens, remainders, and a space for book talks where visiting authors read to audiences and sign copies you can buy right there, cash, check, money order, credit card.

Just a few years ago, when President Carter was still living and talked about his new book, the line went down the street, block after block after block, and around the corner. People waited for hours, all day if necessary, for a chance to buy his book and shake his hand. The line and wait was even longer than the drive-thru line of cars at In-n-Out Burger. Burgers are food for the body, but books are food for the mind. And for the soul, if you have one. And if you have no soul, keep reading, and you will.

That’s why

There used to be bookstores.

Belatedly, diminishingly, there still are. But as the need rises, availability declines.

And record stores. There used to be more, and they often combined forces with a book section. Some are past and gone, like Moby Disc.

Tower Records lived up to its name, two stories high, at the corner of Lake Ave. and (I’m trying to remember the cross street). Classical records (of course) were relegated to a sound proof room on the second floor, where there was a little corner section book store (classical, of course). But, equal opportunity, they also carried Rolling Stone Magazine.

I would sit inside that room for hours while the music played in the air, hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world, and I read reviews, record jackets, formed informed opinions, and bought more than I could afford.

Tower Records is gone now, replaced by a two-story whatever.

And down the street on the other side, there was a new addition, Hunter’s Books, new and the latest, upstairs with enthusiasm and trying hard to develop a clientele, because, you know, Pasadena.

I remember the time when an employee bemoaned the recent visit of the famous author, Vincent Bugliosi, who reclaimed history of the assassination of J.F.K, and was now the best selling talk of the town with his book on the Outrage of O.J. Simpson who was everywhere in the news and you could achieve instant fame by writing about him. The employee said, “He stops by every week, but only to check the sales figures of his book. He never buys anything. His brother lives in Altadena. You’d think at least he’d support local business.”

I nodded in agreement. “You’d think so,” or maybe the more current vernacular, “Ya think?”

I formed an opinion of the author without reading his book, confirmed by the lament of the employee at Hunter’s Books.

I knew Bugliosi’s brother. They shared the same last name. His house on Holliston was just behind ours on Highland. He climbed over the fence once when a child hit a ball into our yard (unless my memory is conflating him with the neighbor next to him). My wife would talk to his wife over the fence, so she knew them better. He said his famous brother rarely came to visit. I have a brother too, so I partly understand. My brother is not famous, not even to the people who know him.

My wife and I went around the block to the yard sale when our Bugliosi neighbors were clearing away prior to selling and moving. They had already cut down a tree that threatened the garage, probably as a condition of sale. We got a guided tour of the house, upstairs and down, saw that their rooms were smaller and our house was better. We bought a few things, including plants in pots from their yard. Some we had seen over the fence from our yard, so we were already acquainted. I loaded them into a child’s wagon and laboriously pulled them around the corner and up the street to our house and yard. One went under our magnolia tree where everyone could see it as they walked by. We get a lot of walkers, because our street is the only one in Altadena that has sidewalks. At least we were the only one for miles around, and were apparently famous for it.

I think this was the source of our famous night blooming cereus plant. It was in a big slatted wood planter and we put it on the porch in the corner where it was out of the way but still got sun. It bloomed once a year at night, and people came from far and near to the bloom party when we announced that the buds had grown, started to vibrate and open, and tonight was the opening night.

It was an Event that should have been on a bigger calendar and maybe was. People drank and snacked and chatted, and the radio was playing music in the background, and the porch was crowded and the overflow was on the steps, and each of the big white blooms would shake and open a little more, like a living creature, then a little more, the crowd would clap and cheer, another vibration and opening a little more as if to bow to the applause, and then, finally, late into the night, the last shake and it was finally fully open, the big white blooms several inches wide, releasing their iconic perfume to blocks away, the scent like laundry detergent.

“See you next year.” I wondered what kind of empty lives some people lead, if this is the highlight.

Some of us who see analogies shuddered at the parallels, the shortness of life, the bloom of youth, then age and death, we bloom for a night, we see before us the petals droop and die, hanging limp and dead in the morning.

“See you next year!”

And what does all this have to do with bookstores? Well, I admit I do get distracted by tenuous contiguity, and I now get back to the subject at hand, which is…

There used to be bookstores.

Hunter’s Bookstore is long gone, alas. So is, more recently, the attempt to establish in Pasadena a franchise branch of Half-Price Books. As I understand it, they started in Dallas Texas with their flagship Mother Store, there used to be a big one in Berkeley, I’m not sure if it’s still in operation, and the store on Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena was in the center of our Downtown.

This was in the final stages of many things, Shirley was in and out of the hospital, I could hardly walk, my hip was killing me and I was hunched over struggling with a walker. I saw the signs advertising the Grand Opening of Half-Price Books, parked in the back, hobbled inside for details. They were filling the many shelves, unpacking boxes trucked up from Orange County. Yes, they wanted more books. Yes, they sold books at half price, and if I brought some, I would get a percentage. This was music to my ears, because I had recently closed down Sterling Books as an International Franchise of ABE Books, because I physically couldn’t do it anymore and the storage of all those thousands of books was eating me alive. I was desperately trying everything I could, packed a few boxes of books, and drove back a few days later. They say, “A day late and a dollar short.” I was a day late.

The back door was closed. I balanced a box of books on my walker and hobbled around the corner to the front, which was also locked. There was no one inside, and books were scattered about, the shelves unfilled. I went into the adjacent restaurant where they were getting ready for the evening crowd. The food smelled good.

Apparently the corporate decision had misjudged the Pasadena location, and Half-Price books closed before it opened. I wanted to cry in frustration and pain, thought about just leaving the box of books by the door, but I’m of the old Clean Plate School where you never waste food, and books are sacred. So I hobbled back around to the car with my heavy box of books, sat for a minute in frustration, and drove home.

The best laid plans of mice and men included bookstores.

There used to be bookstores, and I still wasn’t one of them.

I can recognize an obsession when I see it, but don’t always know what to do about it. I cherish the illusion that the more I talk about books and bookstores, the more I will encourage people to buy books and read them.

The way the world is going, it’s desperation time. A lot of things that used to be are gone.

There used to be bookstores.

I see I’m writing the way so many people do, sequentially by chronology, then sequentially by content, this reminds me of that. It’s a Big Subject in a Big World, and I want to cover all the bases, which means getting out of Pasadena to other places, like Eagle Rock.

There was this bookstore on Eagle Rock Boulevard, a couple blocks down from Colorado, almost to the Occidental Campus where the former President used to go. They called him Barry. I think I’ve already said this as recently as paragraphs ago.

The bookstore owners specialized in children’s books, of which I had many, they were friendly, accommodating, and I donated to them.

Years later, when I was finishing up my tenure with ABE Books but still trying, a customer ordered a Cliff’s Notes title that I didn’t have, I went to that store to see what I could find. There were new owners, two young guys who looked fresh out of college, maybe Occidental, or maybe one was the owner and the other just hung around like a friend, and I asked if they had any Cliff’s Notes.

They both laughed, said, “Nobody uses them anymore. Now it’s the internet when you want to cheat.” But one steered me to a bottom shelf where a row of yellow and black thin stapled paperbacks showed Cliff’s Notes still exist. I thumbed through, surprised to find what I wanted, bought it cheap, and asked if they took donations. They said, “Whatever,” so I knew they were the next generation. I felt old.

Then there was that row of bookstores in Burbank. One specialized, of course, on Movie Memorabilia, actor autobiographies, posters. “If it’s movies, you want it, we got it.” I bought selectively. That may be where I got my copy of Chaliapin’s Life written by himself and translated into English.

Next door was a general bookstore.

Across the street was a famous store that sold books about rocks. Geologists hung out. They also sold rocks. Some rare, some collectable. We bought cracked geodes.

Then there’s Hollywood itself. Lots of bookstores. Some catering to tourists who rode double-decker busses to the Homes of the Stars. On the way, off to the right, a cross street from Hollywood Blvd. or Sunset, was another iconic bookstore I had read or heard about on the radio, PBS, Public Broadcasting, or, more likely, KPFK, the liberal station Shirley and I were members of, on the Community Advisory Board, and had made a promo they broadcast frequently in those days. Their signal was strong, from the big radio tower on Mount Wilson, the biggest strongest west of the Rockies and every other station was always trying to buy it but KPFK wouldn’t sell. The bookstore had contemporary books, not quite beyond the fringe but pushing it. I stepped in, looked around, maybe bought, I don’t remember.

There used to be bookstores

of various degrees of respectability, especially in or near Hollywood, where they were always trying to clean up the streets and scantily clad people were completing transactions at the corner.

Like the very famous bookstore of the questionable reputation, where one of the major east/west streets splits and branches off as the street goes uphill, you park, enter, and there are two doors. The door on the right has the books, some spicey, some racey. The door on the left has videos, and booths to watch them in to see what they did with the books so you didn’t have to read, and they also had the more explicit books and magazines which you had to hide in a bag or plain brown paper when you left the store. I guess they got away with it by making a deal with the police in exchange for free department access.

That was not the kind of store I was planning for, not a source or a specialty, and I took it off the list.

There used to be bookstores,
and I had high standards with high aspirations. I was not opposed to carnality, enjoyed it myself, but I wanted the world to be better than low.

And the International Bookstores. There was one in the Fairfax District when you drove down Sunset from Los Feliz. It was on the right, the basement floor of a hotel or apartment house. There were ground-level windows to let you know there was something there. You went downstairs into a Big Room with a low ceiling, well-lighted, books arranged geographically by language, a lot of French, German, shelves of Spanish, because L.A., and half shelves of lesser-known languages, like Hungarian.

I asked if they took donations. They said in a foreign accent, probably north European, “Absolutely!” I brought them a bag of books in Italian. I’ve always wanted to get books to the people who want to read them. I wasn’t in it for the money. They were delighted. “You doubled our Italian section!”

They’re gone now. Like so many, like so much of the world.

I drive down Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena now, and it’s an Avenue of Bookstore Ghosts. Ghosts and Memories.

There is a mall. A new one. They tore down the old one, at great expense, because in the old mall’s parking lot a woman was brutally murdered all over the news and no one wanted to go there.

The new mall, the Paseo, is mostly open air, with a big antique mini-mall housing lots of little independent bookstores with shelves in the corners, but it’s not the same and there aren’t very many books.

The Paseo does have a giant shoe store, and I mention it only because I went there once. Shoes eventually wear out. The soles have holes. The stitching sometimes gives way and the top becomes disconnected from the bottom, an undesirable situation for any human. The store was like a giant wearhouse, rows and rows of styles and sizes. They helpfully asked my size, had me sit while they searched the catacombs, and found the last pair remaindered in my size, 6 ½ EXTRA EXTRA DOUBLE DOUBLE WIDE for what Shirley called my Duck Feet. No one had asked for that size for years and the shoes were gathering dust. They gave them to me for a token $5, down from $175 new. Apparently nobody has little feet anymore in the adult section and you have to go to the children’s department. I wrote a poem about it once called “Little Feet.” I know there’s no necessary correlation between foot size and any other part of the anatomy, because some of the biggest guys have the smallest…self esteem.

Back to bookstores, because this is not a city tour, and

There used to be bookstores.

There was an International Bookstore on one of the major east/west streets. I would drive by and turn my head to see the sign listing the languages they stocked. Los Angeles is a cosmopolitan city. I hope the store is still there. The tariffs may have closed it down.

Then there was that Los Angeles bookstore in South Central. Shirley and I and our dear friend from the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Coalition in Pasadena where we were Board Members and went toodling around as we often did finding adventures. This time we were on a quest, like an Odyssey, to find a particular bookstore that featured African American literature. Our friend was a school librarian before she retired, loved children and loved books, separately and together, knew of the store, and we found it. It was closed. The front door was impenetrably opened a little for air flow, you could see to the back where the door there was open to the parking lot and you could see movement. We yelled out. “Hello!” Someone came to the front, explained that they weren’t open at the moment, and directed us to another store with the generosity of the brotherhood of the fraternity of booksellers.

We drove on over through a neighborhood new to me, parked, and Shirley went for take-out lunch, while my friend and I went inside, climbed the shelves, and found treasures.

My friend is black, I’m white, the neighborhood is African American, but none of that mattered. People are people. We talked to the owner at length, who sat resting, pointing to a section and a shelf. He knew what he had and where it was.

We talked about the current state of affairs. People, if given the chance, tend to think alike and reach the same conclusions. Especially in a bookstore, especially in a used bookstore, where the books have already been read and books are a common experience. We bought an armload. We support local enterprise.

Then there’s Beyond Baroque. That’s the center of literary avant garde in greater L. A. They spread the word on KPFK, that remarkable bastion of liberal thinking, experimental art, and real news. Shirley and I were on the KPFK Community Advisory Board and made a promo for the station that was frequently broadcast. You can track it down and hear what we sounded back then. We were irresistible.

Beyond Baroque is a whole complex on the way to the beach. They host readings, publish books and magazines some of which contain stuff I wrote, and have a bookstore. I got to know people and was peripheral to the inner circle. I think that’s where we went to a poetry reading by one of my former professors at UCR. We bought his book, he signed it, and inscribed it while trying to remember who we are. He has his own story which I may tell sometime when the statute of limitations runs out.

Then there’s that bookstore on the California coast which we discovered by accident while driving north. It was late at night, very dark, very hot, I was tired. We stopped at a little motel which had complete vacancy, no air conditioning, and a fan they reluctantly brought us from their house. The fan didn’t work, and we sweltered all night.

We woke to a morning sea breeze and went across the road to what looked to be the only other building at this bend in the road. It was an independent bookstore that opened like a pull-up garage door and no back wall and opened on the ocean. The owner wasn’t there, a friendly woman substituted, there’s more to the story which reveals the human nature of people who read, especially of the sellers of books.

Shirley found a lovely book on ballet. I found one on current trends in literary criticism. We watched an old shabby man, who looked homeless but not dangerous, shuffle up to the woman in charge with a big expensive coffee table book. He presented it to her, she looked it over, appraised it, and gave him money. He shuffled away, now able to buy breakfast. Book sellers are always buying books that they can sell. The man had obviously done this before. It was like a ritual. I was convinced that he had surreptitiously picked up the book off a table when he came in. The “exchange” was a way for him to save face and not beg for money. It was a way for the store to help the poor.

Book people are among the world’s best. Selling books is an enterprise, not just a business. We get books to the people who want to read them. We’re not in it just for the money, it’s a way of exercising democratic altruism, a way of saving the world. Apparently it was an unwritten policy of the store by the ocean, and I loved and respected the owner without ever having met him.

This reminded me of the exchange in the iconic used bookstore in Pasadena. The owner was sharing his enthusiasm for a current bestseller that purported to explain the economic system of the world. Shirley showed great interest, and he just gave her the book as a gift.

Everything reminds me of something else. I thought about my own customer who wrote to me at length by email, which I was still learning how to use. I’m a clumsy tech neophyte. The customer wanted a special book on theology. He was living on a small island at the end of the world, ministering to a small native population that could barely sustain a church or a school. He was living alone, hungry for human companionship and anyone who spoke English. We began a correspondence that lasted weeks. He told me about the island, his early life, and his concern about the book was not so much about the price but about how to get it to him. There was no regular mail delivery. I checked with the local post office which enjoyed the challenge of the research, and found out that the special delivery by boat would cost several times what the book was worth. The time invested in one potential customer was more than I could afford, he had assuaged his intellectual loneliness for awhile, and decided not to buy the book. I thought about just sending it to him as a gift, I know that saving the world can involve individual interactions one by one, but I barely had time to live a life, teach school which occupied me seven days a week, and the complexities of monetary foreign exchange posed unexpected problems, and he had already decided not to buy the book after all, so I didn’t send it.

This is just one more example of the life of a bookseller, me, even online without a brick-and-mortar store who nonetheless sold thousands to thousands. Thinking back,
I learn more about the world, about life, about me.

Years later after our visit to the oceanfront bookstore, I actually met the owner when we shared a poetry reading at the Dunsmuir Library. Now we’re good friends and I need to keep in touch and visit him in the back country where he still sells books out of his house. Michael Sykes. He has a publishing company, Floating Island Press, that features big name modern poets. He’s mentioned in my blog and deserves a full entry, because how often do you meet a new friend who thinks so much alike and you become instant friends for life? Not often enough.

Ah, those were the days when

There used to be bookstores.

There were so many in my purview, and I can survey them chronologically, as many writers do when arranging a narrative, or ranked by importance, as many writers do. I apologize for my scattershot where I do both as one thing leads to another.

Thinking farther back, high school, bookstores and the avant garde, there was a famous comedy store on the strip when Hollywood was one of the three centers of the Beat Generation, along with San Francisco’s Haight/Ashbury and New York on the East Coast. I was an outlier in a time of fringe. I was the shy academic one, a book nerd, not part of my own generation, but a walking contradiction because I was the school’s top debater and Captain of the Tennis Team, Junior Varsity, and an intellectual rebel.

There were three of us, like three musketeers beyond the fringe. One boy and one girl who flaunted rules and went barefoot, and me, who did have other friends but was not part of any generation, wore shoes but had an open mind and didn’t trust authority because I knew what it did and where it was going. We three hung out by default.

My two friends were hippie wannabes and had heard that the coffee shop of the comedy store had an upstairs where the beats read their poems to their kind of audience. My friends wanted to go to see if they could blend in.

My friends used me as their entry ticket, dressed me like a beatnik, black pants, black turtleneck, and drew a moustache and goatee on me with an eyebrow pencil, combed my hair backwards, and I led the charge.

We drove over to Hollywood, parked, and they were disappointed that no one stopped us at the door to check our credentials.

We climbed the stairs and passed through an outer room with shelves and books for sale, a little internal bookstore. I wanted to stop and read the books to find out what the beat mélange was all about. Some of the names I recognized, but my two friends, dressed less authentically, dragged me away and pushed me ahead into the main room where the audience was waiting for the poet to appear and begin reading. The audience briefly glanced at the interlopers, uninterested, and turned back to the stage.

My friends dragged me back out. “Let’s go. We saw what it’s like, we proved our point, and I’m driving.” I wanted to stay and read the books.

When I got home, I washed my face, went to the library and checked out some books and read enough to know. I came SO CLOSE! This was even before I knew about Beyond Baroque.

I know this is getting long like I’m writing a book. I hadn’t planned to, but it almost is. But I can’t quit without mentioning the little bookstore I created at the high school where I taught. It’s in my blog. Look it up. [“Waves and the Shore, and Books” posted 04/21/2024].

There used to be bookstores,

so many I could go on almost forever, and I almost have.

But I just have to mention the bookstore in Orange County. Book Baron. It had a cowboy vibe, but covered all the categories. They were going out of business, selling off the inventory, and advertised it widely. We drove on over, and booksellers from everywhere, even out of state, were rushing down the aisles, filling shopping carts, grabbing at the shelves where several hands reached for the same book. I muscled in.

The afternoon wore away, we were tireless. I was kneeling in an aisle, filling boxes. Shirley, who had wandered off to look things over and find the dance section, came looking for me to see if I was almost ready. She looked down the aisle and saw me hunched, filling a box, and wearing my typical jeans and flannel shirt, my pony tail banded and hanging down my back. But then there I was in the next aisle, wearing the same jeans and flannel shirt, hair in a pony tail, and in the next aisle, and the next. She cried out, “All you booksellers look alike!” We all turned and looked in her direction. I stood, looked around, and saw that she was right.

I loaded the car with boxes that strained the car’s suspension, and made arrangements for the other boxes I had crammed full. They were labeled and set aside in an avenue of waiting for pick up, I drove home carefully, unloaded, and came back the next day for the rest. I checked my bank balance, looked wistfully at the emptying shelves, and gave up. They had given me special attention because of the volume of my purchases. I had instantly joined the ranks of major booksellers, and I didn’t even have a store!

So many missed opportunities, and a store that never was.

There used to be bookstores.

I’m not even mentioning my enterprises with Cal State. That’s another blog.

My memory goes beyond my plan
and I remember when
there used to be bookstores.

Side Note: There’s this new bookstore they opened in L.A. a few years ago. It’s called The Last Bookstore. It isn’t, but that’s a catchy title. They commandeered the downstairs of a block. There’s a loading dock on the side where trucks back up and wheel stacks of additions inside. The store itself is spread out almost like an amusement park. A central area surrounds a raised promontory where authors can read or proclaim, or music groups and bands can perform and there’s room to dance like a rave which I’ve never been to. I think they have a piano. I think I had more books than they did. They had special areas to attract or occupy children, and the Big Draw, in all the newspapers and on television, an arch of glued-together books that you walk under to get to the next cubicles, like Disneyland or an amusement park. Obviously those books were expendable and not sacred. I thought about the Nazi book burnings which Ray Bradbury replayed in his book Fahrenheit 451, I almost said 415, the temperature at which books burn, and we saw in the movie where the camera showed closeups so you could read the titles, you knew a lot of them and had read some yourself and yelled, “No!” in the theater.

I may go back and donate some books.

I always did whatever I could, played my part to save the world. I got my students to read, sometimes by blackmail or trickery and subterfuge, “You want the grade? You gotta read.” Sometimes I was lenient. “OK, this time you can choose the book.”

Of course there are thrift stores and they have books. I visited every one. There are fewer now. I have my favorites. I donate to and buy from.

My love affair with books, getting them to people who want to read them, began early.

When I was younger, just a mere boy, maybe even before high school, I wanted to do something nice for the family at Christmas.

There was, maybe still is, a thrift store in Alhambra, one block west of Garfield, two doors up from Main Street on the left side. My Mother took us children there by bus and bought our clothes from the bins. She dressed us well. They had a bookstore section with shelves and shelves. They had books for a quarter, sometimes a nickel or a dime, like a miracle.

So I took the bus by myself because I was courageous. I clutched my money. I had an allowance, I think it was a quarter a week, for doing chores like cleaning my room, sweeping the floor, doing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom tub and toilet, watering the yard and trimming the trees. My Mother wanted us children to be fiscally responsible.

So I went to the thrift shop bookstore and browsed happily for what seemed hours. I bought a philosophy book for a quarter for my Father. I got a cookbook for my Mother, hoping she would. I got an easy reader about teenagers for my Brother. I carried my three books home in triumph on the bus, after dropping my bus fare coins in the glass windowed slot where the bottom opens up and swallows them.

I came home and carefully wrapped each present in appropriate paper and ribbons to suit each person, and put them carefully under the tree so everyone had at least one present. My present was knowing they all had something.

And, thinking of thrift shop bookstores, there was the book section in the Big Thrift Store on Washington or Colorado. The President of the School Board, whom I knew personally from Board Meetings and discussions in his office where we talked about education, my classes, plans for the future. I had lots of suggestions. We were Education Buddies and I was Inner Circle.

But what I remember particularly was the way we gravitated to the same section in the Thrift Store where they had the books, records, and magazines.

He went straight to the National Geographics. He was collecting them, had a garage full, and was trying for a full set. His Wife, another Pasadena Leader, tried to issue a restraint, “They’re crowding us out of house and home!” So he slunk to the Thrift Store where I was pawing through the books and records. He was assessing the condition of an early issue of the Geographic where all the photos were black and white and native culture was on full display. We showed each other the treasures we found and philosophized about the vicissitudes of life.

Good times.

And then, because I’ve already gone on too long, wait! What’s that you say? Don’t stop? OK, I won’t.

And I do want to get to the memory which started this ramble in the first place about when

There used to be bookstores.

But wait! First, a mention, because it’s relevant and revealing, there was this one time in New Mexico.

We had driven east from Santa Fe, or maybe it was west if I turn around, and Santa Fe was too expensive to live there. The parking lot attendant at the Santa Fe Opera told us the lot was empty because the Opera was on break, but we could still get tickets, cheap, ten dollars, for a special annual performance by all those company members who were not headliners, like the chorus, or walk-on comprimarios with a single line to sing that got them listed in the program, this was their chance to shine, take center stage, and sing the arias. They were all as good as just about anybody. This is what we could afford, and to this day I can say without prevarication, “Yes, I’ve gone to the Santa Fe Opera.”


Our friend, sweeping the empty lot, when we asked what it was like living in Santa Fe, said, “I can’t afford to live here. The closest I can get is two towns away.” He was Native American, talked about his tribe, and was proud of it.

I thought, of course, about Los Angeles and all those cities across the country and around the globe, where people can’t afford to live where they work. Life isn’t fair for most of us, the majority, and there’s a lot of work to do to make things right.

So we were driving east out of town, or maybe it was west, and we came to Las Vegas.

“What??” you say. “Vegas is in New Mexico?”

No. No relation except the name. And the desert and the heat.

When we drove in, it was like a Ghost Town. No one on the streets, shops closed, restaurants empty, no traffic, the local college on the main road closed for the summer. We almost didn’t stop.

But one store was open. It said it had everything you could ever want or need. We didn’t believe it, but stopped, parked, went in.

The lights were off, dusty illumination from the windows, and no one, it was empty.

Then we heard noises from the back and smelled food. Middle Eastern.

A swarthy man came out, wiping his fingers and mouth. We had interrupted his lunch. He came closer. “Can I help you?”

We got to talking. The food smelled good.

I wondered if I should invite myself to lunch because I’ve learned to eat Mediterranean, but I had the sense to not.

I may have said, “Having lunch?”

He may have said, “Where I come from, it’s the midday meal. We eat, and then we rest for hours.” So I knew he was from there, and he confirmed it. He was the only one from his country in the whole town, which made him exotic, but that only helped with business if there were tourists. There weren’t.

There were very few books for sale in his store. There were fishing rods, so somewhere there must be a river. He was still trying to figure out what to buy and sell. We verified our credentials by our Greek connection. We may have traded Hodja stories, but I’m not sure. My memory blurs.

We drove further down the empty street, and there was a bookstore. It was open. We stopped, went in.

A middle-aged couple was trying to sell the store. We were the only customers, and we were only potential.

I said, “Do you have ‘Sky Stone and Silver’?” That’s an iconic book about turquoise jewelry. I had been looking for it for awhile, to fill the gap in our collection. Our bookstore was going to have everything about everything.

The owner guy knew that I was seriously informed about what I was asking about and not a lookie-loo, and said, “No.” He added, “We do have lots of others related. Wanna buy the store?”

They showed us around. They hadn’t seen another living soul for days.

“We live out of town and can manage with the money we’ll get from selling the store.” They were cautiously eager.

I admitted, “I always wanted a bookstore, but this looks awfully small.” It was.

He said, “There’s a downstairs,” and pointed to the steps going down. There were several rooms. Some could hold more books. There was a bedroom and a kitchen and a bathroom. “You could live down here, and come up to sell books. We did, before we bought our house.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “I’ll put you on the list.” After all these years, they’re probably still there.

So we drove back toward Santa Fe, and turned left. That’s the Turquoise Trail, the back road up and down to and from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. Jimmy, Papou, my step-Father-in-law from Athens, would laugh and tell us that “Albuquerque” to Greeks is the funniest word in the English language, even funnier than Boris Karloff saying, “Antipasto.”

The first stop on the Turquoise Trail, coming down from Santa Fe, is Cerillos. We took the off-road exit, hoping for a bookstore. We were always looking. The list got longer, and then we saw the place and the list got shorter.

The first structure on the left looked two-storey, but only had a high ceiling. Strike one.

It was for sale. We stopped, went in.

The owner proprietor was talking with a Native American, probably Navajo, as they looked at turquoise jewelry. Skystone and silver.

We were greeted and invited to look around. A very respectable collection, including baskets and pottery, and spirit-catchers for the children. But Shirley and I both agreed that the place was too small even for our book collection without everything else, even with high shelves and tall ladders. We gave an appraising measurement silently with our eyes, thought about opening a wall and adding an extension. We wanted to get excited but were cautious.

We looked outside. The land around, part of the package, had a large stretch of lawn between the shop and the highway. We could plant a vegetable garden and live off the land, at least partly, if we guarded the tomatoes from birds and critters.

Back at the end of the lot was the house. That’s where we would live. It was smaller than our own house, but big enough to live in comfortably. The owner’s wife was walking across the grass, bringing his lunch, carrying a steaming plate.

Shirley and I looked at each other. “We wouldn’t have to go out for dinner.”

Again, I think that later queries indicated that they didn’t sell after all.

Makes sense to me. When you find a place where you can settle down, you settle down. And these days, nobody can afford to move.

We decided to scope out the town, which was really too small to be a town. We didn’t see a market or gas station or church, and if there was a Post Office, who can say?

One street branched off from the “Main Street” anchored by that first shop. It went down one block and ended in the river.

On the right was a complex of several long connected buildings, and a fenced area with a goat and a chicken. The sign said, “Local Cowboy Art Museum with Indians, and a Bonus Petting Zoo for the Children, affordable prices and street parking.”

There was plenty of parking since the whole street was empty. Two children, at least one of which was a girl, were petting the goat and the chicken. They were demonstrating for the tourists, us, how the petting zoo works. They said, “We used to have a pig, but we ate it.”

Shirley wanted to go inside and see the Museum. I was always pinching pennies, and said, “You go, and tell me about it.”

I sat in the car for hours with the window open. She came out, and I asked, “How was it?” “It was nice.” “What did they have?” “Lots of stuff. Some of it was really nice, pottery, jewelry, maybe even rare. You wouldn’t expect it in a little place like this. I hope they’re making some money besides what they got from me. The children look hungry.”

So I turned around and drove to the intersection, turned right on Main Street and drove to the end at the end of the block. The livery stable was on the right, then the only new building in town, an art gallery. A local artist had bought the land cheap and built new because down the street in Santa Fe you couldn’t even afford to walk on the sidewalk. That’s not quite literally true, but every artist wants to have a chance. Sometime I’ll tell you more about Santa Fe, if I haven’t already.

We turned around and cruised down the other side. There was one door open, one place of business we could go to, a kind of restaurant pub that said, “Beer.”

We went inside and it was dark and empty except for a prematurely old woman at the counter behind the bar. She seemed too tired to speak, but said something like, “Whattayawant?”

I said, “What are you serving?”

She pointed to the sign.

I said tentatively, “Beer? Two, please.” I like beer and used to drink it. She put two mugs on the counter and we drank. “This is a dead town,” she said. “It went downhill after they filmed the movie. “Young Guns.” 1988. Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen. I never saw it. The shootout was right there across the street. Then they packed up and everybody left. Even locals, who knew there would be no more excitement for the rest of their lives. Cowboys used to come in and belly up to the bar. Now it’s just you.”

I asked, “Do you think a bookstore would make it here?”

She snorted. “Look around.”

If she had been more literate, she might have said, “Not an ice cube’s chance in Hell.”

We crossed Cerillo off the list which, like so many others, never got added on in the first place.

It reminds me almost exactly, except for the differences, of that place we found when we were out driving on more back roads and the road bent around a gully like a ravine. It was where they filmed The Milagro Beanfield War, another really good movie that I saw, and you looked down the hill past the beanfield and there were plants in rows and grapes on vines. We went around the bend and there were some houses on both sides, not very many, but green plants and shade so you could live there, houses you could go out and water the yard, and on the right, a house about the same size, and a sign that said something like “Wine” and maybe “Homemade right here.” We drove slow and a little girl ran out of the living room to take our order. I waved as we drove by.

Then, another bend in the same road, and a little dirt road branched off to the right down to a kind of promontory sticking out over the ravine and led to a dirt parking lot in front of a two-story structure like a bunker, open at the top where the store could be, stairs inside leading to the lower level where you could live and serve breakfast to customers. “This could be our bookstore!” We got excited.

Then we looked closer. I think we drove down. On the left was a not very big building, like the government, for water or coal digging, and a little museum for local history of the company and its family. It didn’t cost very much and we both went in for a look. On the same promontory, as I remember, was where our bookstore would be. We got closer and had doubts. We decided the only people who would come there was the biker club. They hung out like a pack and revved their engines all day and late at night and we wouldn’t get much sleep. So we said no, and drove on down to Albuquerque.

We have friends who used to live in Albuquerque, in a trailer down by the river. They liked it. It felt free. There was also an Old Town that had been there for years. I first saw it when I was eight years old, or maybe nine, because my birthday is in October. There’s a lot of adobe. There’s a perfume store that sells Flowers of the Desert. We had stopped there on the way back to California from New York because my Mother missed my Father. Lo these many years later, Shirley and I camped just outside the city and that store was still there and smelled the same. She bought the same perfume my Mother did so long ago, passed down like history in the family, even if you’re not related.

When we got to Albuquerque at the end of the Turquoise Trail, there were passenger balloons hanging in the air.

If

There used to be bookstores

in Albuquerque, we didn’t know about because we didn’t look.

This is sounding like a travelogue on a quest for bookstores. Well, I guess it is. So this must be where I talk, briefly, about two stores in Oregon. Shirley and I visited both many years ago. We had driven up to Eugene, Oregon, to visit friends, a colleague who taught with me at Longfellow Elementary in Pasadena. She also wanted to have a bookstore, retired, and opened a store across from PCC. I helped her move in, bought and donated. The location wasn’t quite right, the students bought new textbooks rather than used books, so she moved her store to Colorado Blvd. among the other book stores. I helped her move, set up shelves, climbed ladders and filled shelves. I was like a silent partner, a friend for no money. Then she sold books from her house, covered shelves on her patio. Then she moved to South Pasadena where she rented wall space from an antique store in exchange for working with their customers to sell the antiques. She was not allowed enough time to spend with her own customers. She packed up and moved again. I felt almost like a real partner, but I was still teaching and we made no formal arrangement. Then, fully retired, she moved with her daughter to Springfield, Oregon, near Eugene, and we visited and went to the iconic Smith Family Bookstore across from the college, a major establishment, and then our friends took us to see Crater Lake and we walked down and stuck a foot in the water.

Then Shirley and I went up to Portland. The home of Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the really great authors of our time (alas, now gone) and a reason to move to Portland. It’s an interesting and progressive city on the river, and boasts one of the most famous bookstores anywhere, Powell’s. All these years later, after we lost Shirley, Kristina and Chaz and I took a road trip up to Seattle and visited Powell’s along the way. It think it was as big as ever, had the restaurant to keep your blood sugar up so you had the energy to keep shopping. I talked to a few people, gave them my card so they could read my blog and find themselves in it. I noted that Powell’s in Portland was like a sister to Vroman’s in Pasadena. Each had heard of the other. They were like lighthouses along the coast, shining against the growing dark.

Well, there’s one bookstore left that I just have to talk about because it’s the one that started this ramble.

It was years ago. Shirley and I were taking Highway 126 that branches off from the 101 and Interstate 5, the backroad heading west to Ventura and the beach. Castaic Junction near Santa Clarita and Magic Mountain. Magic Mountain is like rural Disneyland, and high schools every year bus their graduating seniors there as a reward for sticking it out ’til the end of the year. There are rides and a lot of roller coasters you can see from I – 5 as you go up the hill to Gorman. In my day, they took us to the beach.

The first little town, almost too small to be a town, was Piru. It had its own exit. It also had a school, a park, a little train junction where you could pay to ride open air along the route. We saw the Huell Howser video where he interviewed two passengers who turned out to be our good friends for years and were moving back from Santa Fe from “the last good house available” after selling the First House built in Altadena where they lived for years. Who can explain serendipity? Not me.

Little Piru is actually more interesting than you might think. They filmed the third Crocodile Dundee movie there, partly because it must have been cheaper than building a set on a backlot. The “Main Street” had a wood plank store at the corner, abandoned empty, that could be revived and become a bookstore. It was extensive, and we peered through the windows.

Across the street was an ice cream shop and not much else. The few local teenagers hung out because where else could they go? They grew up small town rural. If they had a car, they could drive to the beach.

Across the street the other way, on the third corner of a four corner intersection, was the local hotel, two stories, with steps leading up to the porch and the door. Adjacent on the left was the hotel restaurant, a coffee shop that sold burgers. They were OK if you’re hungry. Up the street to the north was a long street that passed a row of modest little houses on a hill on the left, then continued through the valley, farms, vineyards, cattle. It ended at the lake, appropriately named Lake Piru.

Before you reached the lake, there was a little cottage house on the left, off-road parking, an open door to a screened room that had signs, open sample jars of honey, a little jar with flattened toothpicks for sample tasting, another little jar for discards. It was the honor system against double dipping. In those days they didn’t have surveillance cameras, or lasers to blast the cheaters.

There were several flavors, labelled to let you know which variety you were trying, sage, wildflower, lavender, whatever. There were little free pamphlets with honey recipes, and the history of honey, folklore and honey through the ages. In the center of the little room was an iron structure like an upended torpedo, padlocked, with slots to put the money in, amounts labeled on the jars. The honor system again. Periodically someone would come by to unlock the deposits and go to the bank. Meanwhile, the owner farmer’s family was out in the fields, separating the bees. Bees were in the air, but posed no threat if you made no sudden moves.

Of course we bought some honey, several flavors. We like honey in our tea. And it’s good on several desserts. And it never spoils or goes bad. Apparently bacteria can’t live in it. And there’s a special thrill of putting money through a slot.

Then we drove on up to the lake. There was a sentry, a border guard. You had to pay to enter. Down below we could see the coastline of the little inland lake, small boats floating, beach towels spread, umbrellas open, vacationing families who didn’t need to go all the way to the coast to get a swim, a little sun and imported sand.

The gate guard asked our intentions, how long our stay, what facilities we intended to take advantage of, like boat rentals. I think I saw a little snack bar truck that probably sold hot dogs and maybe chips and bottled drinks in cans. I said, “We don’t want to stay, just a drive around the lake to see what’s there, maybe five minutes tops.” He proved that people can be human anywhere, said, “Go ahead. I’ll be watching you. Don’t stop unless you buy something.” Inland rural people make the lake a going concern.

As we left Piru, we passed the mansion just outside town. It’s big and impressive, like a castle, built by someone with money who wanted to get away from it all. It’s been in movies. It has a parking lot and gives tours.

Moving down the road, Camulos farm and ranch. We always wondered about it passing by all those years. Now a big sign proclaimed Rancho Camulos Museum Now Open. This was our chance to find out. There was a parking lot, but it was empty. Workers, probably family, said “We’re not open yet, maybe tomorrow, the sign is premature and we put it up too soon. But since you’re here, you might as well walk through and see what you would be missing. Tell us what you think. You’ll be the first ones to sign the visitors’ book.” I said, “We often are.”

So we made documented history yet again.

We looked the place over, happy to see so much local history, a friendly and resourceful family. We wished them good luck.

They didn’t have a bookstore yet, so we kept driving.

Roadside farm stands, local produce, fruits and nuts and hand-squeezed drinks. We bought plums, ripe peaches almost as good as the ones in Greece where the juice drips off your chin, apricots which I always loved because we had a generous tree in our yard in Monterey Park when I was a boy. We thought about the melons which we patted to see if they sounded hollow but would make a mess if we didn’t eat the whole thing right away. We watched them squeeze the lemonade, drank a big glass, hovered in the awning shade and dried our sweat. They had misters going, and we stood beneath their climate change. We kept driving, because if we opened our store here at the roadside, no one would stop because you can’t eat and drink books while you’re driving.

So we came to Fillmore which had a Mexican restaurant that served tilapia, a favorite of my in-laws who introduced us to the place and we came back on our own. Tilapia is like the local cod. I like fish.

Fillmore is a bigger town. More roads went up the slope to bigger houses that reminded us of Altadena or Sierra Madre, where we could live if we decided. And there was a two-storey local museum where we climbed the stairs, and a downtown string of railroad cars that opened one to the next as an extended store with multiple owners that had arts and crafts and fashion and jewelry and, yes, books. It was permanently parked on a railroad siding so the mainline track was free and open for moving trains and the little open-air passenger tour like a ride at an amusement park and you could buy tickets at any stop along the way through the valley. At the corner, across the street, was a full-size bookstore, which would be competition if we settled here and opened our own store that would have everything.

Up the hill on the left near the end was the local library, surprisingly large for a small town. They could accommodate readings, and had their own sale book shelf from which, knowing me, I probably bought from discriminatingly. Shirley and the librarian talked and talked like life-long friends which now they were. Shirley had that effect on people, not just on me. You wanted to spend more time with her. They talked and I looked at the books.

Shirley and the librarian discovered things in common, like a love of ballet, which can exist in the back country far from any stage. Shirley planned a lecture on the history of The Royal Ballet, the librarian was thrilled, ready to schedule it and put it on the calendar. Librarians spread culture. I offered to donate books.

We planned to come back, but you know how things go. Life gets in the way of itself, and has its own direction no matter your good intentions.

Fillmore did seem to have the promising future of expansion, but, as they say, beware, because “the best-laid plans…”

“Developers,” a coterie of money-grubbers who have no soul beyond the bottom line, buy up property, put up a quick cheap splash of housing, don’t wait to see if it survives, they take the money and run to the next town. I saw it happen in the desert beyond Riverside and know the pattern. In the low-level wash beside the highway, like a flood plain, an unscrupulous “developer” had by-passed restraints and regulations by greasing palms, and suddenly there were rows of cookie-cutter homes and suddenly the population increased overnight. Money bets against the future. Ponzi had a scheme. People should know better. Jackals wait until memory dies. They remove old newspapers from the archives. “Hardly a man alive remembers…” The devastating floods that roared down the slopes and washed away homes and lives, dams broke and released an inland tidal wave. We could see the future, refused to be trapped by it, and kept driving. We loved Fillmore, but…

Rejoining the highway, we passed restaurants I may describe when I have time and am not talking about something else, like when

There used to be bookstores.

One of the restaurants was Greek. It was OK.

So, down the road, the quest continued, and we came to Santa Paula. The name reminds us that we’re on the Mission Trail. Santa Paula is an even bigger small town, a railroad stop with preserved memories, and things you wouldn’t expect. You can be surprised anywhere you go.

The town even has, if I remember correctly, on a not main street, a long landscaped lawn, a building that looked Elizabethan Tudor housing an unexpected Shakespeare Society that gathered for meetings and put on plays.

Another street has an iconic two or three-story hotel which still rented rooms, and had the obligatory adjacent hotel restaurant which in this case was Italian. The restaurant was under new management. An ambitious young chef had come over from the Mother Country, bringing his recipes. We read the posted menu, and went in.

The chef himself came out to take our order. It looked like he was the whole staff. He took the order, went back into the kitchen, cooked it, washed the plates, served it up and brought it to the table. He was trying to make the bare bones survive long enough so he could develop a clientele that wanted more than burgers. It’s like the middle-east market in Altadena/Pasadena, the only place in town where you could get a good sheep’s head, and they said, “We’ll do alright once we find out what Americans eat.” It was like that, only Italian.

We asked the waiter/chef what he would recommend on the menu, what was the “specialty of the day.” He said, “Most people like the spaghetti.” He was trying to tell us without saying it, “It takes time to cook things, you need the ingredients, so far the locals don’t know anything beyond spaghetti of out a can, I came over here to “the Land of Opportunity” because I didn’t have money and they promised that here I could really make it, why don’t you try the spaghetti, it’s a family recipe.”

He charmed us with the enthusiasm of youth and aspirations and hope, and he brought us spaghetti. It was good. We said we’d spread the word, and he said, “Thank you,” in accented English. The hope for the future is built one by one. I knew and practiced that all those long years of teaching, and our dream of a store that sold books was just keeping the dream alive.

I’ll come back to Santa Paula later because it’s the scene and setting for the ultimate conclusion of this saga, but first I have to take us to Ojai.

The road splits, left to Ventura, right to Ojai.

So we drove back to the little train station that identifies Santa Paula as a railroad town, and continued up. The road becomes increasingly suburban. It’s the backroad of a backroad. On the left, high on a hill, was a housing development that was more like it should be, no flood plain, and you could see there were already roots. On the right, just before leaving the edge of Santa Paula, there were two square blocks of landscaped mansions, remnants of a former age. It was like a gated community without gates. We drove down and across every street. It was like Altadena and Sierra Madre and the best of Pasadena, and Linda Vista, and La Canada, and if we moved here and opened our bookstore, this is where we would live.

Then, like crossing a border, we were in open country. Fields and trees and hills on both sides, the road gently ascending. Then, on the right, there was a prominent gate leading to the Catholic college that one of my students had applied to and I think was accepted. We stopped to see what I was recommending in my letter.

The guard at the gate questioned our presence. “Who are you and what are you doing here and who do you want to see? Are you on the staff? No? Parents of a current student? No? Making a delivery?”

I tried to explain that I had written a letter of recommendation for an applying student.

He turned us away. “You’re not on the list.”

Well, that tells us something.

We kept driving, pulled off at the view point where signs invited us to view The Pink Moment, available every evening at 5:00 o’clock when the setting sun gilds the landscape, the mountains turn pink, and the view down the valley is Shangri-La.

My students had read Lost Horizons, and in class we watched the movie of it that was filmed here. We all felt the pain of nostalgia, the magic joy of eternal youth, but, like the Garden of Eden, once you leave, you can’t go back and you age and die in the real world. We worked hard to turn our minds to a hopeful future. We knew how to survive literature.

We drove down into Ojai, a town too small to be a city, though it is a municipality and has a mayor. Sometime I’ll write more about it.

At the end of town where we came in, the back entrance, in a parking lot there was an old wagon with shelves, books on sale as an extension of the Library Bookstore which had its own building like a little house with separate rooms for categories.

There was an emphasis on children, because somehow in some ways Ojai is like Santa Barbara or Santa Fe, maybe more so, because of the surrounding countryside. At the end of the road on the right there’s a big famous private school, and our good friends, who are I guess more famous than I realized, are Board Members.

And, going down the Main Street, on the right one block over, is one of The World’s Most Notable Outdoor Bookstores. Bart’s Books. It was/is a whole block surrounded by a fence. Inside there were tables covered with books laid out, open air under awnings. There were several buildings, formerly houses, as if someone bought up the neighborhood and turned it into a bookstore. A separate little locked building, built strong, like classic craftsman style, housed the rare books, open on request. The current owners were a young couple continuing a tradition. There was a lot to look at.

Outside the fence were shelves of books which passers by on the sidewalk could browse, and if they chose to buy, they’d push the money through the fence. The honor system again.

Every morning, the owners would sweep up the money and open the store.

The store was so legendary that people in Europe knew about it. I said, “Well, if there was a new bookstore in town, and it was us, we’d be the competition.”

That didn’t feel right to me, I didn’t feel good about it, to challenge their monopoly. True, our store, the store that never was, would have everything besides books, but we made friends with the owners, moved on, and kept looking.

It remains one of the most remarkable iconic bookstores in the purview of my limited existence, even more so than, in our recent trip to France, the floating bookstore on a barge on the river in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris, which is on the internet which is how we found it, and they often even serve food like lunch on a limited basis which is always acceptably adequate anywhere in France.

I hope Bart’s is still there in Ojai. [It is!]

Ah, the days

When there used to be bookstores

and, though to a lesser extent, still are. Certainly in memory, and, though fewer, in real life.

Getting back now to the business at hand, if you don’t take the back road up to Ojai, and stay in Santa Paula in the other direction, and go down Main Street which is only about a block long, and you pass the rows of thrift shops which all have internal bookstores because even in the rural back country there are people who can and do read, and we browsed every one of them and not just for books, you would come on the right to the extensive storefront which started this speculative reminiscence saga lo these many pages ago.

It seemed to be several stores combined, intervening walls knocked out, hence a real expanse. I was excited by its range, impressed by the quality of selection. This was a bookstore of an owner who read, thought about it, and could recommend. It was sufficiently orderly so you could find things. It had a fondness for American history but was not limited by it.

It had a collection ranging from general to rare. It had been assembled over the years. College libraries should and probably did come to complete their own collections and fill in their gaps. There were all the classics, and books you never heard about and didn’t know existed.

The store also stocked graphic art, paintings, occasional small sculptures, reading lamps, and photographs, lots and lots of old photos, some pre-Civil War when photography was being invented and the inventors gave their names to the process, even executive portraits that might be the only existing copy. I thought I saw Ansel Adams in the back giving a lecture on the levels of light.

On display were action shots of the Civil War. Shirley was particularly taken by a very long panorama of the attack on Harper’s Ferry. She said she had a relative who was there but I don’t remember on which side. I bought the photo for her. She said we could put it up in our store. She said she just had to have it, I could deny her nothing, even if it meant going without myself. When you really love someone, they are more important than you are.

The prices were affordable enough, the floor was swept enough, the books dusted enough. I was so impressed by the store, partly because we had been looking for so long, it was on track to being as big as ours would be, made a valiant effort to have more than just books, and it wasn’t a competition because we would clearly win because our store that never was would have everything.

It was a miracle that such a store we came upon by accident could exist in a small town on the back road of the back road to another small town in semi-rural America.

I said to the owner, “How did it happen that you settled here, off the beaten path, with a remarkable collection that would be the envy of a big city?”

He said, “Bloom where you’re planted.”

The words struck home. I thought he was a backwoods philosopher and had uttered a perfect phrase. Then I heard the same phrase uttered by someone else in a different context. Then another, and another. The internet told me more. It’s a classic iconic phrase, widely known, widely used.

But, no matter, those were “words to live by.” They helped me to survive.

The store that never was never will be.

The life I lived is gone.

I am replanted, but I can still bloom. The owner of a rural bookstore showed me the way. I hope the store is still there.

I hold on to the past. I hold on to the present.

I live again in the hope of a better future, having lived when

There used to be bookstores

and, like planted seeds, there still are.