About Bookstores

A brilliant young lawyer practices in a small town in the Deep South; respected and beloved, he's elected to the state legislature. He continues practicing law while serving in the House of Representatives for years until a case about rape and revenge changes his life forever.

"Like son, like father," Alabama Booksmith owner Jake Reiss III describes his foray into bookselling to BTW. His son Jake IV sold books door-to-door; son Frank became manager of Acorn Books in San Francisco then moved to Atlanta and opened the still thriving A Capella Books in the late '80s. Jake's brother Norman also sold books, at Malone's Bookstore in Tuscaloosa.

Cheryl and Raymond Zadd, co-owners of Mail Hub Plus Books, have long been on the lookout for niches to fill in their community of Brecksville, Ohio. Midway between Akron and Cleveland, with a population of 13,000, Brecksville is a little too small to be courted by any of the big chain stores. And that's just fine with the Zadds. "There are no malls in Brecksville," Ray Zadd told BTW emphatically.

By Kathleen Craughwell
Special to the Los Angeles Times

It's ridiculously early on Sunset Boulevard -- 7:30 a.m., to be exact -- when two women from the Santa Clarita Valley pitch their collapsible camping chairs on the sidewalk in front of Book Soup, the popular West Hollywood independent bookstore. The store will not open for another hour and a half.

In 1992, Sonia Williams-Babers entered the world of bookselling with "the smallest ad available" in the June issue of Black Enterprise magazine. The ad read "Get Hooked on Black Books -- send $1 for a catalogue." On returning home to Fort Worth, Texas, from Anaheim, California, and their first ABA Convention, Williams-Babers and her husband and business partner, Elvis Babers, found an overflowing post office box.

Two major purveyors of the printed word came together recently when the United States Postal Service recruited a bookstore for one of the locations featured in its holiday advertising campaign.

The television commercial was shot at Reading on Walden in Chicago all day December 10, said bookstore owner John Presta. He told BTW, "It went very well. [The ad] is showing all the time now. It's called 'Holiday.'"

A crowd estimated at between 450 and 550 packed A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco on January 11 to raise funds to help pay the legal fees of Denver's Tattered Cover Book Store, which has challenged a court order requiring it to turn over information about a customer's book purchases. The event raised $10,000 for the bookstore.

After 12 years -- and two expansions -- the Okemos, Michigan, location of Schuler Books and Music has a new home. At 24,000 square feet, the new space (in the Greater Lansing area) is a good deal closer in size to the 20-year-old Grand Rapids Schuler Books and Music, which is 35,000 square feet.

"Books saved my life," said author Luis J. Rodriguez in a recent interview. The 47-year-old author is a former Los Angeles gang member whose love and talent for poetry and prose convinced a judge to give Rodriguez a crucial break 26 years ago when he placed him, not back in prison, but on the road to a writer's life.

Eventually a newspaper job took Rodriguez to Chicago. There, he started his own poetry publishing house and wrote the award-winning 1994 memoir, Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (Touchstone Books).