San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Why are books appealing? It’s no mystery
My sister Alyce and her husband, Ben, gave me a great birthday present the other day: a gift certificate to a bookstore. I’m addicted to books and bookstores. It was like giving a gambler a stack of lucky chips.
It gave me an excuse to prowl the aisles of favorite stores, judge a book by its cover, pick up a new book, read a page or two and put it back. I was no ordinary browser. I was a real customer, armed with a card good for a pricey hardback at no cost to me.
I’ve always liked bookstores. I like the look of them: books stacked to the ceiling, shiny, new, unopened. I like the smell of new books, the sharp scent of ink. Or the musty smell of used bookstores, knowledge coated with dust. Sometimes I hunt for bargains — remaindered books, best-sellers that never were, or biographies of the almost famous. Once I came upon the life of King Zog of Albania, marked down for quick sale. You never know.
The King Zog book was at the book sale at the Friends of the San Francisco Library at Fort Mason. I know people who would wait for the annual Friends sale and come out with shopping bags full of books. But I am only mildly addicted.
“I guess there are never enough books,” John Steinbeck said once. But he never saw my basement, which is full of books and other dusty stuff. Or my occasional compulsion to go out and get more, especially if they come as birthday presents.
San Francisco has always been a bookish city, from Mark Twain and Frank Norris to Lemony Snicket. San Francisco has a big main library and 27 branches and dozens of bookstores. A real cultural asset. Sometimes we forget.
You may remember the big book superstores, Borders and Barnes & Noble. They didn’t survive in San Francisco, but big and small bookstores did.
The grandest of all, of course, is City Lights, in North Beach — founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti — a literary landmark of the first magnitude. It is so famous, so eminent, I sometimes feel a bit intimidated there.
So I started my book quest at two of the smaller ones — Adobe Books and the former Alley Cat Books, now called Medicine for Nightmares, two hole-in-the-wall places within a few blocks of each other on the Latino stretch of 24th Street in the Mission. Both are lively little places with art galleries attached.
Not a mile away, in Noe Valley, is Folio Books, at 3957 24th St., a neighborhood bookstore in a very different neighborhood.
The Mission also has the marvelously named Dog Eared Books on Valencia Street, with books spilling out on the street.
I always liked neighborhood bookstores: BookShop West Portal, Green Apple on Clement in the Richmond and also on Ninth Avenue in the Inner Sunset, and Booksmith on Haight. Books Inc, which traces its history to the Gold Rush, has two neighborhood outlets: in the Laurel Village shopping center and another on Chestnut Street in the Marina. The Books Inc. store at Opera Plaza on Van Ness Avenue is what I think of as the flagship of an 11-store chain.
Bookstores are like restaurants. You can’t go to them all, but you can have favorites.
Here are half a dozen. For the most exotic I vote for Kinokuniya in Japantown, a branch of a Japanese chain. Besides the standard bookstore fare, Kinokuniya has Japanese books and magazines, Japanese and Englishlanguage manga and gifts. You feel for a moment that you are in Japan.
When everyone worked in downtown offices, I would occasionally sneak out for a long lunch hour. But not for food. For a visit to the Alexander Book Co. on Second Street. A fine place for browsing: three floors of books — 50,000 of them, discounts on best-sellers, also cards and other good stuff. And a good collection of African American books, novels, essays and material not found in other places. There is also a goodly selection of mainstream bargain books.
I hang out in Marin a lot and have three favorites north of the Golden Gate: Stinson Beach Books, a small shop in a beach town; Point Reyes Books, a cultural outpost in a wildly beautiful area; and Sausalito Books by the Bay, on the edge of Richardson Bay.
The view from there is only surpassed by the Book Passage store in San Francisco’s Ferry Building. The inside is full of books, of course. And outside is the blue bay, and a fine view of the Bay Bridge. Ships and ferryboats coming and going are the backdrop, a moveable feast.
My gift card was good there. After nearly an hour of browsing, I got “The Revolutionary Samuel Adams,” a hefty book of history. And I ordered another book as well. There are never enough books.