Fireside in the Bookshop: A Tale of Melting Sneakers

If you’re a writer or a reader on Substack, and you were born before the turn of the millennium, then you probably have mad nostalgia for your bookstore of choice during your early years.

We all do, the ones of us who’d been lucky enough to have a mom n’ pop joint within driving or walking distance of home, the kind of indie brick-and-mortar shops predating corporate chains like Barnes and Noble, Borders, Waldenbooks, and Crown. We pine for the kind of book shops some few of us still enjoy in an age where not only do the majority of Americans not read hard print anymore, but American bookstores have shuttered almost in totality. Whether it’s the haunted, stacked alleys of a used bookshop and its dusty, bibliosmia of used books, or the last man standing sort of literary outposts that still carry current titles and host author events, we Stackettes and Stackdudes probably go way out of our way to patronize those remaining places. I know that I do.

Here in California, the most infamous shops still in business (apologies to any I’m forgetting) tend to be Vroman’s in Pasadena, City Lights Books in San Francisco, Book Soup in West Hollywood, Bookshop Santa Cruz, The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, the Iliad in North Hollywood, and Warwicks and Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. There are many more if you’re a bookshop aficionado who knows their way around the state. I’ll toss out glowing recommendations for smaller, off-the-beaten-path joints like Raven’s Bookshop in 29 Palms (pictured above, with your Stackette mascot Raven, aka Mayday), Bart’s Books in Ojai, the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Moe’s in Berkeley, Skylight Books in Los Feliz, Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and Small World Books in Venice Beach.

Today, however, I wanted to reminisce about the quartet of book shops whose aisles I came of age within, one of them in my small, rural hometown of the Santa Ynez Valley in California, the other three just over the hill in Santa Barbara.

One could rightly argue The Book Loft in Solvang was the place that essentially taught me to read, as my mother was taking me there, due to my apparent proclivity in language in my toddling youth, well before I even started preschool and K-grades. I can safely say that it was Little Golden Books, the Hardy Boys Dixon hardback series, and paperback Peanuts comics collections that absolutely, one hundred percent, beyond a shadow of a doubt, rendered my initial grasp and eventual pseudo-mastery of the English language. No question. Credit where credit due, there.

The fact The Book Loft is still in business, these fifty odd years later, is staggering, given the literary industry of the 21st century. But it is, and I’m glad for it. It was a hallmark of my childhood, the first indie store at which I chose to launch my debut novel’s signing appearance tour, simply because of its central role in my early literary life. That was a surreal day for me, becoming a gen-u-wine author, manifesting it in the same book shop that quite literally gave me my words. The proprietors there watched me grow into the man that I am today, as much as that’s worth.

Yup, those are copies of my novel in their front window, promoting me way back in 2012. I toured my book all around Southern California, but I figured starting where my literary deal all began was apropos.

Chaucer’s Bookshop is a local legend here in Santa Barbara. It’s been around for fifty years, established in 1974. I didn’t patronize this one too much in my youth, because there were a couple other options whose ambiences drew me and mine more urgently, for reasons I’m about to relay. Nonetheless, as it was the sole remaining mainstay bastion when I first began my indie career, it was the second stop on my signing tour. My appearance tour sounds more grandiose than it was, of course. In typical indie author fashion, it was mostly friends who showed up to support me locally. I had a much wider audience down in Los Angeles, for some strange reason, especially in Malibu and Venice and Hollywood. Funny how indie books sell in some places, less than others. I moved quite a few hard units, actually, had to personally restock a number of stores along the Pacific Coast Highway over the course of a year or so. Such is the nature of vanity publishing, alas.

Yet the two bookshops that compelled me to craft this ode were the ones that most affected the course of my life, the ones I spent the most time in as a kid, a teenager, a young adult, before they sadly went out of business, thanks to the box stores invading town, as was wont for most of American brick and mortars. I miss them something terrible. I am a bibliophile, for better or worse, an outdated warhorse in a digital age.

The first bookstore to which I was endeared was a joint called Andromeda Books in Santa Barbara. I cannot, for the life of me, find any pictures of its interior or exterior online, which is befuddling, but often the case for businesses that existed pre-internet. Yet this book shop was a seminal way point for me all the same. It was a pop cultural kind of store, before there was actual multimedia, part comic book alcove, part movie poster archive, part sci-fi and fantasy paperback heaven. It was here, back in the mid-80s, when I first came upon Frank Miller’s brand new take on Batman, The Dark Knight Returns, and yes, it was as groundbreaking as you millennials have heard.

I also picked up a cherished memento there, quite a pretty penny at the time for a sixteen year old kid with minimal disposable income. I used my precious grocery bag boy wages to purchase an original Road Warrior movie poster for a whopping 75 bucks. It’d be worth a lot more now, but it perished in a rather demonstrative, emotional outburst I had back in the early ‘oughts, when I destroyed my home office because I’d lost someone dear to me. Temper, temper. I think I’d probably have sold it soon thereafter anyway, because Mel Gibson pretty much doused my sentiment in his filmography, what with all his antisemitism and misogyny. It’s a shame, because he was in a lot of signature flicks for us 80’s kids. Now you’re gonna ask me if I can separate art from artist, and pose me a puzzle wherein I either still listen to Michael Jackson’s Thriller or I don’t, after all his posthumous revelations. The answer to that age-old quandary is, it depends. But that’s a subject for another time.

There’s a clear and concise winner in my bookstore heart of hearts. It was called The Earthling Bookshop, a flashpoint literary destination for much of Santa Barbara in the eighties. Its original place of business was a smaller affair, a nook-and-cranny atheneum. What I remember most about it was being able to pluck a tome from its shelves and sit by a cast iron fireplace on winter evenings, taking a spot amidst a wide circle of seated readers, passing their evenings…just by reading! Books. Not iPhone scroll feeds. Books!

Can you imagine!

Me and my girl of the time, also a loyal acolyte of the Earthling, would wander its aisles, find some offhand inspirations in astrological offerings, maybe Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, or Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan, or Thompson’s Fear and Loathing, or Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’d often seek out paperbacks to thumb through, perhaps the latest of John Norman’s sword-and-planet Gor books, John Irving (think I devoured half of Hotel New Hampshire in one sitting), John Nichols’ Nirvana Blues, a revised edition of Tolkien’s Silmarillion, or a Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes collection. I blazed through Jeremy Leven’s Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S. in a single, half-day power-sit. It’s rare these days I get caught up in a good, soapy, adult fare yarn. The young brain, she soaks that stuff up like butter spread to bread. These days, she’s more a crusty endeavor.

When they moved a block down to a bigger space with a lot more square footage, they put in a larger cast-iron fireplace, smack dab in the center of the store, resulting in larger fireside circles of literati. They added a cafe and a coffee bar. All was well in the world. The owners branched out up north to San Luis Obispo and set up another store in that similarly toned, central coast ‘burg. For the life of me, I don’t recall visiting that second outpost, but as you can see from the bookmarks photo above, I clearly did…either that, or the Santa Barbara outpost was shipped some of the San Luis Obispo stock. I kept many of the bookmarks I’d garnered at the Earthling. I can’t believe I don’t have any photos inside or out. Nor, it appears, does the internet.

I can still feel the warmth of the fire, searing through the soles of my high top Nikes, my feet arrogantly perched up on the brickwork ledge surrounding the fireplace, chaise lounge style. A few times, I was so engrossed in my chosen literature of the night, I inadvertently melted the bottom of my sneakers, and apologized to nearby patrons for the acrid aroma of burning rubber.

The Earthling’s whole eco-scape, the crisp smell and glossy texture of new book paper, the hardened glue of never-opened book spines, the rustle of unchecked backpacks, the solitude of the loners in the corners slouched deep within their pleather armchairs, the small footstools littering the carpeted floors to reach higher shelves, the attentive, knowledgeable staff in green aprons, often literati themselves, aspiring Goth students attending Santa Barbara City College or UC Santa Barbara, brunettes in horn-rimmed glasses peering over leather-bound books of philosophy, bearded retiree professors studying technical manuals reeking of musk and coffee, buxom 80s blondes in acid-washed jeans poring through the self-help sections.

And there was my girl, a witchy woman, a porcelain-skinned brunette herself, a drifting songbird, clad in her pink dancers’ leg warmers, her ridiculous, out-of-season, Chinese lotus shoes, her baggy, white, collared polo shirts absconded from my closet, her black chiffon trousers tucked into those leg warmers, and me with my button-up 501s, cat-eye Vuarnet sunglasses, a tee shirt and a distressed Levi denim jacket…yes, we were an eighties couple, no question. I remember her deep brown eyes studiously perusing through an astrological selection of the night. It was not infrequent for her to excitedly whisper a passage extolling the star-crossed vanities of Sagitarrian and Virgo couplings. She ignored my astronomical assertions that if astrology was on point, we’d all be the signs AFTER our sign, because the earth’s view of the stars has adjusted position since the creation of the Zodiac. That said, do I exhibit virtues of the virgin? I do indeed.

I’d often take an idea from some fantasy saga home to bed with us, wherein I’d play a weary, seafaring warrior with the heart of gold, and she’d play the port Tortuga tavern wench, eventually succumbing to my swaggering bravado, replete with thrift-shop period gear patchworked to that venerable style of romanticized, whitewashed, 18th century piracy.

Ah, role play. Such were the luxuries of young love.

Yes, we always made sure to purchase something to patronize the store, a more than fair price of spending an entire date night browsing and lounging around their wonderful shop. It’s true. People did have date nights in a bookstore. Honest. Bookstores were a lot more integral for American pop culture before the internet. Having said that…fuck the internet. It’s virtual. Not real. Bookstores were visceral. Tangible. Grass-rooted in everyday life, outside the pages of the stories they were selling. What I would do, to sit fireside at the Earthling once more on a cold foggy night, would be a lot.

No, I didn’t get to see Ray Bradbury there. Wish I did. This is one of the only actual images on the internet proving the Earthling’s existence, along with the one below, taken at its closing.

It’s gone now, of course. I hope I managed to patronize my sacred ground one last time before its doors shuttered, but I can’t recall, probably because it was the late nineties and I was hip-deep in my parents’ health issues that ended up taking them from me. In any case, this bottom photo is, near as I can tell, the only photo of the Earthling online, other than assorted eBay listings for those same bookmarks I pictured above in the header. How I wish I’d thought of taking some crappy Kodak polaroid camera with us on one of those date nights, just to commemorate our mutual place of power. For like the Earthling, she too, is lost to the dust of history. Well. This sphere’s dust of history. There’s other dunes of dust about the meta-verse. I know of what I speak. Sorta. :)

(If you’d like to dive deeper into that pool of pseudo-shamanic babble, head over to The Bear and the Star.)

Time, she’s a bitch. Life is long, and it’s short. While I realize the quintessential ‘lost’ generation of X falls back way too much on its nostalgic tropes for yesteryear, I think lamenting the loss of mom n’ pop bookstores is a legitimate pining. I’m fine with places like Chuck E. Cheese, Circuit City, Blockbuster, Miller’s Outpost, and Montgomery Wards department stores going the way of the dodo in the unending march of corporate commerce. But bookstores, and their kissing cousins record stores (sometimes both, thanks Tower Records, and Borders too, for that matter), those places were conduits for art. Art is different than infrastructure retail, clothes and hardware and computers. Art is something the digital age is foregoing, piece by piece, with every advance in A.I., with every smart phone’s access to CONTENT. (I hate that fucking term). Literature is art. Dancing is art. Sculpting is art. Painting is art. Acting is art. Playing guitar is art.

We’re painters, and dreamers, writers and scholars, musicians and dancers and artists. All of us, you know. Our garbage collectors, our Wall Street CEOs, our farmers and brick layers and construction workers and lawyers and nurses...each and every one of us has an artiste of some kind within. Whether they’ve actualized that, or been afforded the time and means to actualize it, that’s an imposed yoke of society’s class system and little more. Everybody’s got a left brain and a right brain. It’s usually luck that dictates which hemisphere we eventually follow more than the other.

Do your muddy gray matter a solid this month, and make the time to drop in your local indie bookstore. Buy something. More important…READ something. Turn the pages. Smell the binding. Feel the gloss or the matte on the book jacket with your fingertips.

Do I see the irony in extending this narrative to you via digital means?

I do.

Trust me, if I had a choice, you’d be flipping pages in my poetic, waxing nostalgia, sittin’ there on your porch in a rocking chair, your faithful dog at your feet, sippin’ coffee or hot steaming tea…and readin.’

A dying function. It’s not an art, reading. It’s a necessity. Fuck your Kindle. As much as we need to turn away from nukepunk future tech back to simple, agrarian living, we need to read words on paper again, not ones and zeroes on an iPhone screen.

That ain’t me touting that.

It’s your brain.

Forget about my ranting and raving. But you should listen to that smarty-pants motherfucker inside your noggin.

Here’s where I toss out an egregious, self-serving addendum to my rant here, in suggesting you might enjoy reading my critically acclaimed, award-winning, indie debut novel. Order a HARD copy here, and yes, I wish all remaining brick and mortars still carried it on their shelves, but that launch was twelve years ago in 2012, and my book, good as it might be to fellow Gen X’ers especially, didn’t quite reach reprint legend status.

I guess there’s still time. :)

Even if you pass on my own print edition, please do consider ordering a hard copy of something today, especially struggling authors who appreciate a single sale.

Some of the best sleep I ever had occurred when, come the morning, I discovered I had an open book atop my chest, having dozed off after a marathon hundred-page run of a compelling story into the midnight hours. There’s so many awesome side effects of actually reading off the grid, in hard copy form, but the most pertinent is, naturally, your brain wants that food badly. It misses it. It is starved for it.

Better yet? Read to your spouse or your kid tonight. Read aloud. From a hard copy. Not an iPad. They need to hear the pages flipping. So does your brain. :)