ACRES of BOOKS

One Saturday morning I went with Dad and Marilyn down to Long Beach's Acres of Books, 1960-2008.  It was a huge used book store with shelves to the ceiling, or so it seemed, and books stacked everywhere.  It was glorious.  Anyway, as the three or four of us were getting lost in the store, I remember ferreting through a stack at a table of books just down the aisle from my dad.  And I heard him utter as loud as he could in a quiet place, "Oh, my God I found it."  "It" was a reference to his grade school primer in which he had scrolled his name "Billy Walgenbach" in elementary school.  It was a book that had gotten away from him.  And here he was years later in a completely different town plucking a piece of his property back from oblivion.  I remember being amazed at the serendipitous nature of it all.  How random and what luck he had. 

In 2007 I made several trips to that store to buy books for the kids at Garfield.  We were building a classroom library, but I wanted to provide them with books that I thought would be interesting.  I remember I gave a copy of Michael Jordan's autobiography to one kid and he was ecstatic, asking me "Sir, do I get to keep this?"  I said "It is yours."  And I found several copies of Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape.  I also found a few copies of his Baby Watching that I bought and handed out to a couple of the girls in class.  I don't know, I guess in retrospect, the gesture could have been viewed by them as inappropriate.  But at the time I loved his works.  And his insights on children made me happy.  The history of the book store, at least the history found at Wikipedia, is interesting.  

Acres of Books was a large independent bookstore in downtown Long Beach, California.

The business was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1927 by Bertrand Smith. In 1934 Smith moved to California and established the store in Long Beach; he moved to the current address in 1960. Acres of Books was the largest and oldest family-owned second-hand bookstore in California, claiming to have in stock over one million books.

In 1959 Smith gave to the people of Long Beach a collection of rare books, some dating back to the 15th century. Included in the collection is a two volume facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible, all of which is housed as part of the Loraine and Earl Burns Miller Special Collections Room at the main branch of the Long Beach public library.

In 1990 Acres of Books was designated a cultural heritage landmark by the City of Long Beach.

In its long history Acres of Books has served clientele such as Jack Vance, Upton Sinclair, Stan Freberg, Gary Owens, James Hilton, Greg Bear, Tim Powers, Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, Paul Schrader, Fran Lebowitz, Robert Easton, Eli Wallach, Diane Keaton, Larry McMurtry, and, most notably, Ray Bradbury, who immortalized the bookstore in an essay entitled "I Sing the Bookstore Eclectic".

Acres of Books closed on October 18, 2008.^[1] The owners have sold the 12,000-square-foot (1,100 m²) lot the store is located on to the Long Beach Redevelopment Agency for $2.8 million.^[2] Subsequently, the Redevelopment Agency was dissolved by order of Governor Jerry Brown.

The site was proposed to be developed as an art exchange, but the project seems to be moribund.

The bookstore appeared in the film The Jane Austen Book Club. 

Here are some decent pics of the book store.  And here is a decent personal essay by a local Long Beachean.  Is that a word?  And here's some news on the store before it sold.  It does, as is in  most cases when the local government gets involved, sound like there is some intrigue surrounding the business and the site of the store.  Somebody, somewhere wanted that piece of real estate pretty bad and it sounds like the city forced the "cultural heritage landmark" designation on it and still the owners sold it.  Don't get it.  Here is something from LA Times writer, Tony Barboza.  Is he a friend of Nick's?

The history of Acres of Books goes back some eight decades to when bookseller Bertrand Smith moved from Ohio to Long Beach and opened the shop in 1934. In 1960, he moved to the site on Long Beach Boulevard, which previously housed a country-western dance hall and, before that, a car showroom.

I liked so many things about this store.  Its size, for one.  I liked the checkout counter with the display glass that featured certain books, novels and classics and such.  I liked the fact that it had two entrances, one on the north from the parking lot there and one at the west end of the store.  I loved its openness that was limited to the room where the checkout stand was.  The rest of the store was made up of narrow and carpeted trails between book cases and some dark alcoves where a wall or vent was exposed and only a bookcase or two, evidently a section that went mysteriously unfinished.  No one ever sought to retrofit the bookcases.  The owners bound the cases with a single two-by-four that arched across the aisle.  It looked as bad as it sounds.  The 2 x 4 ran at a 30-degree angle, which only put a question mark to the design of the place.  Engineers they were not.  Book emporium, few could aspire to such a title.  But in many ways it was the lack of design that made people feel comfortable here.  It was part garage, part basement occupied with all the intelligence and disinterest of an adolescent young man.  The front light was quite nice at almost all times during the day.  The store also sold some school supplies; apparently, used books didn't always cover the bills.  But its history called forth more than that.  As we've read, this place was partly hallowed by legends like Ray Bradbury, Eli Wallach, Diane Keaton, and, among others, myself, my father, and Marilyn D.