Celebrating Third Place
Dutton’s demise in the land of Amazons
The starkest lesson I learned recently about the survival of independent bookstores in the age of digital retailing and corporate cannibalization came not at the Irish wake for Dutton’s in Brentwood last weekend – a stirring and sad occasion for everyone in this city – but in the pretty mountain town of Durango, Colorado.
Durango doesn’t, at first, seem a particularly likely haven of book-loving. It’s a mountain resort at the southern end of the San Juan range, a gussied up former silver-smelting town with a couple of fine Victorian hotels and a Main Avenue packed with souvenir shops, outdoor equipment stores and restaurants.
True, Durango is also home to a small university, Fort Lewis College, and a smattering of hippies and other big-city refugees attracted to the stunning scenery. But it’s no Denver, no Boulder – seat of the University of Colorado – and certainly no match for the book-buying appetite of L.A.’s Westside.
And yet, there on Main Avenue, is Maria’s Bookshop, one of the finest independents in the West. You can tell within minutes of walking in that this is a shop assembled by people who care passionately about books, want to steer you only to the best titles, and want, above all, to harness the energy of their clientele to create not just a retail outlet but also a community center.
Much like Dutton’s you might say. Here, though, is the difference. Andrea Avantaggio and Peter Schertz, the proprietors of Maria’s, own their building. It’s hard enough to make a living from the mark-ups on literary fiction, poetry anthologies and historical recreations of the conquest of the West. But at least Avantaggio and Schertz don’t have to worry about real estate going through the roof, or landlords dreaming of condo complexes. They don’t need anybody’s charity to keep the rent affordable. They need only keep the community on their side.
If that was all it took for Doug Dutton to keep his bookstore going, he’d be in business for another hundred years. People didn’t just patronize his flagship store on San Vicente Boulevard, they adored it with a passion. At last Sunday’s wake, you could hardly move for people crammed between the palm trees in the central courtyard, crammed into the store’s three wings, crammed even into the coffee shop and the sidewalk outside.
They were readers, writers, community campaigners; people who, whatever they felt about books, sensed that Los Angeles was losing another important piece of its fragile sense of civic purpose. Dutton’s was very much a writers’ bookstore – hundreds upon hundreds of us launched our own titles with a reading, either in the tight confines of the West Wing, where the fiction and poetry was stacked, or in the roomier (but often colder) air of the courtyard.
The thing that captured many of our hearts was the way Dutton and his staff (often Diane Leslie, who moderated many of the readings) paid close attention even to first-time writers and made us feel important, whether our books went on to sell well, indifferently or not at all. That was the community spirit of the place: the idea that words are both the gateway to knowledge and also the ultimate consolation for the cruelties and money-driven vulgarity of the modern world.
Sometimes, though, consolation is not enough. As has been chronicled by the Times and others, the Dutton family badly overextended itself with its secondary branches, especially the store in Beverly Hills which closed just over a year ago, and ended up more than $500,000 in debt.
Enter Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, who took over ownership of the Barry Building where Dutton’s Brentwood is housed and spent the better part of a year toying with the roles of both angel and demon.
First he wanted to knock down the building and turn the site into a condo complex. Then, with the real estate market turning (Brentwood is littered with half-baked condo projects, halted in their tracks by the mortgage crisis), Munger relented, telling everyone how much he valued independent bookstores – hah! – and how he wanted to preserve Dutton’s in some form, even if that meant confining it to the corner of his new condo/retail/whatever development.
Then Munger met his most fearsome match in the form of Diane Caughey, the daughter of the original architect of the Barry Building, who launched a noisy campaign to have the Barry Building declared a cultural landmark and thus immune to the developer’s wrecking ball. Caughey and Doug Dutton were not always on the same page about this – she wanted the place kept intact at all costs, while he was more interested in a compromise that would allow everyone to keep at least a little of what they were after – but she ended up prevailing, securing the integrity of Milton Caughey’s original 1961 design and essentially leaving Munger with a huge crimp on his future plans.
Caughey, who was in attendance last Sunday, made no bones about her low opinion of Charlie Munger, and even relished a story suggesting the low esteem in which he evidently holds her. At some point during the negotiations, Munger and Dutton talked about the sorts of departments an independent bookstore should hold on to. Dutton mentioned new books, fiction, and then – mindful of Caughey’s day job as a Jungian psychotherapist – tossed psychology into the mix. “I guess we can have a few psychology books,” she reported Munger as saying, “but no Jung. Nothing by Carl Jung!”
The compromise Doug Dutton was hoping for eventually materialized, but it wasn’t enough to save his store. As he announced a month ago, Munger agreed to withdraw all claims on back rent and pay off his debts in full, in exchange for the store’s closure on April 30. Dutton is also allowed to keep the bookstore name and is, theoretically, free to reopen elsewhere. We shouldn’t hold our breath about that, not with real estate prices and commercial rents being what they are on the Westside or, indeed, in the rest of Los Angeles.
Perhaps the saddest part of the whole story is the fact that this is in fact a time of unique opportunity for independent bookstores. After years of encroachment on the independent sector, the two bookselling behemoths, Borders and Barnes & Noble, are both hitting hard times because of stiff competition from the Internet. That makes perfect sense: when a store offers nothing beyond an inventory frontloaded with Ann Coulter bile-spewings and knock-offs of the Christian fundamentalist Left Behind bestseller series, why bother actually going there when Amazon.com is so quick and easy?
Independent stores, by contrast, offer something the computer cannot – the bookstore equivalent of the Third Place concept, a place to meet people, feel part of a book-reading community, attend readings, drink coffee and, hey, sit down with a laptop and write.
Dutton’s in Brentwood was about the best Third Place imaginable, with that courtyard and sense of both space and erudition – a “perfect marriage between building and bookstore,” in Diane Caughey’s words.
The funeral wake will, in effect, continue all month, as the already depleted shelves empty further, the markdowns grow bigger and the sense of impending loss grows by the day. As the titles vanish, the number of comments and testimonials left by grieving customers will surely grow. Among my favorites spied on Sunday, a quote from Cicero: “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” And another line, in improvised Latin, scrawled in black marker on an empty bookshelf:
“Numerus stultorum infinitus est.” Which translates loosely as: “There is no limit to human stupidity.”
Published: 04/02/2008
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