I Sing the Bookstore Eclectic (Ray Bradbury essay, 1989)
It is a labyrinth, a tomb, a catacomb, a maze. It is the best walk-through multimedia experience, if not on Earth, if not in all America, at least in the western part of the United States. In its dusty roundabout winding corridors, turn here and you collide with Shaw, turn there and you knock elbows with Gibbon, go farther on and you wind up in the company of a wild bunch of Victorian children, nameless until now, surrounding you elephant-high on all sides, calling their titles and daring you to remember. What I describe is the Acres of Books bookstore in Long Beach. (It does, indeed, cover the better part of an acre, a whole city block on Long Beach Boulevard.)
To continue, it is a watering hole, a grand place to prowl on rainy days, to open books never seen before and probably never to be seen again, as the rain chatters on the high tin roofs, and you get that old wondrous time-spell feeling of hoping that when you turn the next stack you’ll meet a lion with a pride of hunters soon behind. Carl Akeley, on the shelf, grabs a rhino’s horn and leaps over its back to land safely. Somewhere in the high dust, Martin and Osa Johnson still fly over Kilimanjaro, and the children of Dickens grub in the soot and ask for more.
But, you protest, most bookstores have some of the above. Most libraries contain a touch of dust magic, a remembrance of fabled years. The characters you love do swarm the monkey-tree stacks.
Good. But not good enough.
I go to Acres of Books, as I go to Paris, or Rome, or London, or New York, to be – lost.
Half the fun of travel, as we all know, is the aesthetic of lostness. Not being able to put Piccadilly together with Regent Street or relate Hyde Park to distant Charing Cross, that is deliciousness. To go down the Spanish Steps in Rome and – vanish. To go out in Paris midnight crowds and wonder why you love it so, as texture after texture drifts by and you wish you could walk forever.
So it is with Acres of Books. I go there, finally and completely, to be lost, in two ways. Not only in the serpentine multiplicity of shelf on shelf and stack on stack, but lost in the variety of strange people I meet. Far over in the Victorian section, I stumble on 500 books by four dozen authors I have never heard of before, all published between 1870 and 1905. Henty is there, of course, and Kipling. But who ever heard of James Otis, or W.H.G. Kingston, or Harry Castlemon, and why not just seize them and invite them home?
Old theater programs from London plays in 1905? They’re there. Art books published in 1899? They’re there.
I go there on rainy days for a good dose of this lostness, plus the grand incense of book dust, which I deeply inhale as others take snuff, and clean the booktops with a sneeze.
Is all this romantic bilge, spilled forth by an aging Martian who has lost his marbles in the tomb? If a million books aren’t romantic, what is? Is all this worth the savor of walking through and wanting never to come out, because these corridors filled with imagination and history are preferable to that drab spring-fog noon waiting to trap you out on the careless street? It is. Worth everything. And cheap. I bought 30 books there one great rainy morn, for $42.55!
The place may be gone soon. A phalanx of city officials, eminent domain specialists, urban planners, and gang-banging steam shovels may soon knock the place flat, shut up Chesterton-Shaw’s debates, march Caesar’s legions into the sea, and cement the whole damned thing over.
Better get there while you can. The dust is waiting like an Orient spice. The literary ghosts are waiting like the friends you always wanted and now at last find. The winding corridors promise you to be forever going on a journey and forever lost. Bring your flashlight for late in the day. Ask for me. Tut’s in there somewhere. Inquire. He’ll tell you where I am.
(Transcribed from a printout of an old California Magazine scan. The essay seems to have vanished from the internet, so I’m putting it back up. I was a regular customer at this very bookstore and it was awesome. The owners were forced to close in 2008 due to pesky developer greed. The building sat empty for years and another developer recently acquired and razed it. Only a tiny sliver of the 1933 Streamline Moderne facade remains.)
