Awestruck in Long Beach
Photo by Oscar Zagal
By Ron Garmon
Squeezed into oblivion by big-box rivals and the Internet, the independent bookshop will likely become a last-century curio before much longer. The puzzling part is how few appear to even notice. L.A.’s indie bookstores, once conveniently spaced literary oases dotting neighborhoods across the county, have now shrunk to a few great names and chance holdouts. Of the former, the best-remembered of all may well shut its doors after many thought it was already gone.
A storied heap of print and paper arrayed behind a New Deal moderne storefront, Acres of Books has occupied the same cavernous address at 3rd and Long Beach Boulevard since 1960. That was 26 years after Cincinnati book baron Bertrand Smith relocated to Pacific Avenue in Long Beach and one year since he gave the city a two-volume facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible. Time passed, the postwar boom faded, municipal memories lapsed. Smith himself died in 1963, but the hangar-like retail space remained in family hands, with granddaughter-in-law Jackie Smith today running the shop she’s worked in since 1976. Stark lettering on the outside walls announce STILL OPEN and a few intense sobersided folk squeeze past each other in the aisles, alone in their stern bibliophile quests.
Jackie and I sit in her upstairs office, a rickety eyrie perched over long, narrowing lines of absurdly high shelves. The skylight lends a dust-glazed glow, like a cozy mid-afternoon in Borges’ Library of Babel. The building looks ageless and, to Jackie, might as well be. “There are two theories,” she laughs. “The place was built in 1911 and 1922, but either way, it’s old. It was a wholesale market and then a car dealership, but when Bertrand Smith bought it, it was a Western bar and dance hall. Evidence of the western bar is the big painting in the music room, the cowboy wallpaper in the bathroom.”
Acres of Books’ current woes don’t derive from market conditions and technological anomie, as much as the upscale condo-loft boom and a City Redevelopment Agency that wants the retailer gone. Again. “In 1982, we went through the same thing when they built the mall catty-corner over there, which has since been torn down and rebuilt. It was enclosed, like a prison. No windows on the outside, just a big brick megalith sitting there. Montgomery Ward’s and Buffum’s both went out of business and the whole mall just kind of crashed. There was a huge flap at the time and many, many people came to our defense. We got close to 10,000 letters of support. We went to the City Council and then the economy dumped.”
No such campaign is materializing this time, despite the city naming Acres of Books a historic landmark in 1990 and the mass die-off of bookshops generally. There were reports of possible eminent domain seizure of the property, but Jackie claims the Redevelopment Agency is pursuing the cheaper policy of “making us offers we can’t refuse,” while demanding costly renovations. A collapsed real estate market saved them before, why not again? “I don’t know,” she allowed, “It could happen. In the meantime, what have we got around us? They’ve destroyed the street, there’s vacant lots here, empty buildings there. Why come all the way down here and fight traffic just to shop at the same stores you find everywhere else? We have a tremendous client base, but it’s amazing the number of our fans who think we’re gone already.”
Failing a happy outcome amid general catastrophe, how long has her famous bookshop got? “A day to a year,” she smiled. “My husband and I spend a couple of days a week looking at properties to move to. I’d reopen it even if it was a Bertrand Smith’s Backyard of Books.”
But what about this collection? “Books still come up with Pop’s price in them and he’s been dead since ’63, but they’ve been sitting there waiting for somebody to want them. We couldn’t do that in a smaller space, we’d have to keep the stock current. You couldn’t be sitting at the desk and hear someone say “Yes!” from the back.
“It’s a way of life I don’t think will ever come back again,” she sighed. “It’s just gonna be something that’s gonna be gone.”
After we spoke, I surrendered to ancient vice and roamed the stacks. Ray Bradbury once wrote of this place: “What could be more romantic than a million books?” At that moment, moving in the pale haze of the Fiction Room, nothing came to mind. Instead, some few billion words sang between yellowing covers around me like decaying music of the spheres. I felt like awestruck bibliophile Burgess Meredith in that famous episode of The Twilight Zone, only there would never be time enough at last.
Published: 12/20/2007
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