The Independent Bookstores: Down but Far From Out

When book people talk about a real bookstore they’re apt to describe a delightfully cluttered place where old or rare volumes gather dust on warped shelves and customers bent on serendipity step gingerly around untidy stacks of esoteric paperbacks.

It is a place only distantly related to one of those neon-flooded storefronts sandwiched into a mall between a cookie shop and a place that sells running shoes, where the clerks don’t know the difference between Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe.

But, in Los Angeles, soaring rents, clogged freeways and proliferating shopping malls have combined to place the real bookstore on the endangered list. The number of independent booksellers dwindles; only last week Hunter’s Books announced it will close its Beverly Hills and Westwood stores on Christmas Day. Papa Bach and the George Sand Bookstore are history.

Rents Escalate ‘Irrationally’

Louis Lengfeld, whose Beverly Hills Hunter’s books opened in 1924, will tell you business was fine until rents began escalating “irrationally.”

“If you just stand a cashier at the desk and take people’s money, then you can afford to pay it,” he said. “But we’re simply old-fashioned enough to want to give service. And it isn’t possible to pay more in rent and salaries alone than you can possibly net.” (Three other Hunter’s bookstores--part of Lengfeld’s Northern California-based Books Inc.--are alive and well in Pasadena, La Jolla and Scottsdale, Ariz.)

Lengfeld believes the adage that Southern Californians read less than Northern Californians. (The number of independent booksellers in Southern California has dwindled to about 80, while in Northern California there are still more than 300.) Even so, he takes the pulse of Los Angeles and finds a thriving, eclectic book culture, albeit one with progressively fewer outlets.

Neither the discount houses such as Crown Books, which Lengfeld refers to as the “drugstore people,” nor the foibles of publishers bent on spending good money “to promote bad books” has convinced him otherwise. “We deal with Southern Californians who read first-class literature,” he said.

Until it closed last May, many book lovers frequented Charlotte Gusay’s George Sand bookstore on Melrose Avenue for its sophisticated, high-brow, esoteric selection and commitment to customer service. Gusay laughed, “If they asked me to stand on stilts out in front of my store and flip to get a book for them, I’d do that. In most stores, you’re lucky if you can get somebody’s attention.”

Eventually sidelined by long hours (“I was working between 12 and 18 hours a day”), rising rents (hers was to go to $1,500 a month) and, finally, the birth of her daughter, Gusay nevertheless left behind a clientele that included entertainment headliners and major movie houses. And a legacy of hundreds of cars driving around Los Angeles sporting “I’d Rather Be Reading Jane Austen” bumper stickers.

Still, among the survivors there is a thriving network of independent stores, each with its slice of the L.A. book scene.

Just 18 months ago, when others were closing their doors, Idalia Gabriel, Nola Butler and Gabriel’s son, Philip, took the plunge into the book business, hanging out the Butler-Gabriel shingle in a one-time corner jewelry store on Westwood Boulevard close to UCLA.

The two women had met when they were working at Hunter’s Books. Gabriel, who was born in Puerto Rico and is, by education, an architect, laughs as she admits, “I guess we’re sort of financial ignoramuses. We just sort of muddle through.”

The store is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day except Sunday, when it closes at 6, and the three of them, plus one woman volunteer, are the total staff.

Computer Not Spoken

People come to Butler-Gabriel for titles from small presses and for personal service, including special orders. “We are so tiny,” Gabriel said, “and so different.” Computerese is not spoken here. “We write everything down like little dopes,” she said. “Every single title we sell, we write it down in a little notebook.”

Among its clientele are undoubtedly some who frequented the venerable Westwood Bookstore. A 1983 casualty, it was forced to relocate from its original Westwood location to another in a high-tech, upscale but off-the-beaten track storefront and soon went under despite efforts of book lovers to save it by establishing a nonprofit foundation to run an in-house lending library.

“I don’t think anybody in the book business makes a whole lot of money,” Gabriel said, but just as important is that “the people are really glad that we’re here and they tell us, and that makes you wish to stay.”

“We do strange books,” she observed. One of their big Christmas sellers is “Quiddities,” a philosophical dictionary from the Harvard University Press.

“We’re having a lot of fun, we really are,” Gabriel said. “But we never get a day off. I think people (in this business) just get tired after a while.”

It was early evening at Chatterton’s Bookshop on North Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz, and proprietor William (Koki) Iwamoto was fielding a call from a woman looking for a book of “aerial views of Virginia.” No, he didn’t carry that one.

And you won’t find how-to arts and crafts book. “Or horse racing books,” Iwamoto mentioned. “Someone just asked. She was totally aghast.”

But on Chatterton’s shelves among about 75,000 volumes and half that many titles can be found books on Zen and macrobiotics, Armenian dictionaries, Vietnamese cookbooks and volumes on Anais Nin (who once was a customer) and Russian film maker Andrey Tarkovsky.

Chatterton’s had a little scare when it looked as though its neighbor, the Los Feliz Theater, with which Iwamoto says his shop has “a nice symbiotic connection,” was going to close permanently. But, he said, “We’re doing OK.”

It is a browsers’ paradise, the kind of store other bookstore proprietors refer to as “a real bookstore.” There are the brick walls, the exposed ducting, the well-read staff. And there is the Chatterton lore: As an undergraduate in pre-med at UCLA, Iwamoto became fascinated with the life of Thomas Chatterton, an 18th-Century English romantic poet who, tormented by feelings of failure at the tender of age of 17, downed a fatal glass of arsenic in a pitiful garret room in London.

Iwamoto almost took a financially fatal step in 1979 when he opened a second store, since closed, in Pasadena. There followed another blow: In 1985, while the roof had been lifted from the store during earthquake-proofing, a torrential spring rain hit, soaking a third of the inventory.

A Lot of Old Friends

At its low point, Chatterton’s stock had dipped to fewer than 20,000 volumes and, Iwamoto said, old customers drifted away, “disillusioned. But they’re coming back. We’re seeing a lot of old friends. It’s nice.”

Chatterton’s handles special orders with a smile and stocks small-press books, many with obscure titles. Iwamoto estimates that half of his titles sell only one or two copies a year, yet these are books a self-respecting bookstore should have. “Take somebody like (Baruch) Spinoza,” he said. “There’s something missing in the philosophy section if you don’t have Spinoza.”

His inventory, Iwamoto said, is dictated largely by his customers, whom he describes as “literate, well read, well educated.” By and large, they don’t come to Chatterton’s to buy the latest best seller.

Yuppie-subject books, such as those dealing with child development and houses, are selling less well, he observed, while the “New Age stuff” is hot--things like Eastern philosophy. He theorizes that the baby boomers “have a little more leisure now. Their kids are older. They’re going back to all that exploration that they did when they were 18 or 19. And they have more money to spend on books.”

“The only thing that really sets us apart,” said Glenn Goldman, proprietor of Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, “is that we haven’t made any fatal blunders.”

Goldman opened the store 13 years ago, while he was still in business school, and his mix of business savvy and love of books has brought him a loyal clientele.

He views a bookstore as “part of the social fabric, not unlike a library, not unlike a museum.” Though he has only “an amorphous image” of who his customers are, Goldman keeps in mind that “I’m buying for this store, not 50 or 100 stores. And I’m on Sunset Boulevard. I’m not in Minneapolis or in Washington, D.C.”

That means he stocks lots of entertainment books, books for writers, art books, English literature books, small press books. “The overall mix is more international than you’d find in a chain,” said Goldman, who goes book-shopping at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair.

At Book Soup, the latest Danielle Steele might sell one or two copies but customers are snapping up “Who Got Einstein’s Office?” Currently, William Claxton’s photos with text, “Jazz,” is doing well, as is Lester Bangs’ “Psychotic Reactions.” And Ann Beattie’s compilation of “The Best American Short Stories 1987” is what Goldman calls “a monster hit.”

Overall, he is convinced that “reading is in a growth phase” even in this audio-visual era. “The mass media address what’s common to people,” he said. “Books address what’s unusual about them.”

Esoteric, Obligatory

The esoteric is displayed at Book Soup side by side with the obligatory. Goldman said, “I keep my ear very close to the ground. One thing I pride myself on is that I’ve always managed to stock titles the chains and other independents have sold out of.”

One of his “coups of the year,” he said, was placing an ad in Private Eye, a British magazine, for “Spy Catcher,” the candid autobiography of Peter Wright of M15. The book was banned in Britain and, at $19.95 plus $3 postage, Goldman sold “thousands of copies” there.

His ad read, “SORRY, MAGGIE!”

On a recent day, a couple visiting from England came in and placed a special order for the Facts on File book, “History of Invention.” They got it overnight--by Federal Express. “Naturally,” Goldman said, “they’re going to pay a hideous amount of money for it.”

Almost as an afterthought, he asked, “Don’t tell people they can get books the next day.”

Goldman operates on the theory that “people don’t need us to show them what everyone else in the country is reading.” You’ll find Bret Easton Ellis, Truman Capote and Stephen King but you’ll also find Julian Schnabel.

In the back of the shop Goldman has a cowhide on which he collects autographs of celebrities who appear in his store for book signings. The names include Dennis Hopper, Wolfgang Puck and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones.

A customer came in seeking “The Oxford Book of the Dead.” The clerk, who knows her books, was stumped. Could she be looking for “The Tibetan Book of the Dead?” Together, they perused the catalogue and the shelves; the customer would return armed with the correct title.

Rick Raeber, co-owner with his wife Debra of Lido Books in Newport Beach and West Coast sales representative for Norton, was on a bookman’s holiday, a visit to Book Soup. He and Goldman are friends; he bought stock on “Spy Catcher” from Goldman when he found he had under-ordered.

Tracking down Titles

Newport Beach is light years from West Hollywood. Raeber’s clients tend to be monied and they expect service. He describes a typical scenario: “Someone will call up and say, ‘I heard about this book. It’s about so-and-so.’ My wife will spend 20 minutes on the phone” tracking down the title.

“We buy everything we can get our hands on in travel,” Raeber said. And he has sold out several times on “Ghosts,” a book on World War II aircraft. He explains, “There’s a lot of lawyers and doctors who fly, people who have money and have time for cars and planes.”

At Lido, the buying tends to be less scientific than emotional. “If we like the book,” Raeber said, “we buy first-time authors in large amounts. That’s usually where we get hurt the worst.”

But, balancing that, there are happy surprises such as “Capable Cruiser,” a book for armchair sailors and real sailors by a local writer. In Newport, Raeber’s shop sold 30 copies. At the same time, he said, “We’ve sold about 10 Shirley MacLaines.”

Outside the Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose Avenue, a hand-lettered sign cautions customers to beware of $28 fines for parking in resident-only spots. Inside, tacked to a wall, is a notice that someone left a pair of blue contact lenses in the store recently.

When the Bodhi Tree opened its doors 17 years ago, it was by co-owner Phil Thompson’s description “a little bookstore in sort of a run-down part of town.” But the trendy and the fashionable have gradually encroached in West Hollywood. “Now,” Thompson lamented, “it’s difficult to time your visits around parking regulations.”

That saddens him. He takes pride in the store being “sort of clubby,” a place where people of like interests can meet in a non-intrusive atmosphere. He wants the store to be accessible and, to that end, it is open every day from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Thompson, a tall, lanky man in Birkenstocks, is, like partner Stan Madson, a one-time aerospace engineer. His personal journey that began in a traditional Cincinnati home led him to disillusionment with things military and to a desire for personal growth. “Times were changing,” he said, “and we were changing.”

With a third partner, who has since left, he and Madson and their wives opened the bookstore with the idea “that we would be able to each work six months and take six months off.” Instead, the store took off and before long they were being approached by people from Palm Springs to Alaska wanting franchises. They have always demurred. Explained Thompson: “We never got into that ‘Let’s throw them up all over’ mentality.”

Rather, he said, he is interested in helping others who are seeking personal growth and understanding. There is a staff of 100 who share the owners’ philosophy of self-enlightenment--and store profits as well.

As of 10 years ago, Thompson said, “We’re our own landlords.” Otherwise, “We certainly wouldn’t be here.” He describes the Bodhi Tree as a metaphysical bookstore, “what people nowadays call a New Age bookstore.” It is, he said, for people “open to the subtleties of the human spirit.”

There is the unmistakable smell of incense. Books on diet and holistic healing share space with videotapes on Chinese Lovemaking Secrets, tarot and reincarnation. Among perhaps 25,000 titles are books on channeling and Zen Buddhism, on extraterrestrial phenomena, bilingual Korans and Muslim tracts.

“Los Angeles is the place of diversity and experimentation,” Thompson said, “the land of Huxley and Christopher Isherwood and the Theosophical Society. We didn’t invent anything. We’re just a bookstore. That community’s always been here.”

Shirley MacLaine on TV

But the New Age movement has attracted a good smattering of athletes and movie stars and, Thompson acknowledged, when Shirley MacLaine goes on TV and talks about channeling, that’s apt to translate into new seekers finding their way to his bookstore.

He is accustomed to celebrity browsers (MacLaine has been in and Timothy Leary is a regular) and he knows that other celebrity believers send messengers to buy for them because “I see the checks.” But Thompson is not one to be overwhelmed by any of this. He shrugs, “I’m sure they go to Rexall, too.”

There are subject areas with which he acknowledges being “uncomfortable,” such as ritual magic. But he excludes only books that are “really exploitative,” such as tracts on witchcraft and animal sacrifice. He doesn’t carry cult thrillers--”I think they exploit portions of a person’s soul”--and he doesn’t carry books on Satanism, which he considers manipulative and potentially dangerous.

He has also rejected books glorifying drugs. He said: “I’m not going to put in books like how to make your own synthetic cocaine or roll your own dope. It’s out of step with the times.”

In the years since the store opened, interest in books on traditional Eastern tradition has waned somewhat as Western writers have adopted these theories and are explaining to readers “how to deal with yourself in your culture,” as Thompson puts it. Now, he said, “You don’t have to be a minor Sanskrit scholar” to grasp the meaning.

One of the New Age symbols is the crystal, used by devotees for “centering” and available in all shapes and sizes at the Bodhi Tree. “I can’t say I’m deeply involved,” Thompson observed, but when he does not understand something, he refuses to trivialize it by calling it “harmless.” Instead, he asks himself, does it help someone? If it does, it’s apt to be found in the store. The stock includes Buddhas for home altars, meditation pillows, negative ion machines, herbal toothpaste and oil of myrrh.

And the clientele? Eclectic, to say the least. On a recent morning a reed-thin, oh-so-bouffant blonde in a gray jogging suit appliqued in gold kid was perusing the diet and health book list and a young woman in a dress-for-success suit was shopping for a book on life passages.

“These books are important to people,” Thompson said. “They’re not just casual reading.” Then his eye fell on the new books table, where Garrison Keillor’s “Leaving Home” was prominently displayed. “You can buy that for much less at Crown,” he said, “but I like Garrison Keillor.”

Thompson paused by the shelves holding cassettes of New Age music. There, among them, were Chopin and Beethoven. He smiled and explained, “Old New Age Music.”