It was bad enough when Brand Bookshop closed in July 2014, but now its across-the-street neighbor on Glendale’s Brand Boulevard, Bookfellows, is closing at the end of this month.
Bookfellows was likewise a used bookstore, a bit more clean and orderly than Brand, specializing in fiction, especially genre fiction. Its science fiction selection in particular was the stuff of legend, with shelf after shelf of mass market paperbacks from the ’60s to the ’80s, arranged alphabetically. Ray Bradbury logged more than 20 in-store appearances, and it was easy to see why he would like the place.
The store had sections for certain prized characters, such as Sherlock Holmes, not just the books but Holmesiana such as pastiches and studies, and for classic fantasists like ERB, Lord Dunsany, Talbot Mundy, Clark Ashton Smith and the like. In many ways, this was my favorite bookstore around L.A., and the fact that it was near Brand Books and in the same block as the Alex Theatre added to the allure.
Well, the Internet has eroded the brick-and-mortar book business, making the store, open since 1999, increasingly untenable. The owners, Malcolm and Christine Bell, sell on the web too and decided to focus on that. (It’s known online as Mystery and Imagination Bookshop.) Good for them, but too bad for those of us who love wandering the stacks, carrying want lists but willing to be surprised.
I made a pilgrimage there from Claremont July 2, the day after getting back from vacation, to see Bookfellows one last time. Everything was 70 percent off. Much of the best stock was gone by this point, but if I were in more of a book-buying frame of mind (and didn’t already have a few unread books from the store) there would still have been finds.
Most of August Derleth’s Solar Pons mysteries were there, in multiple copies, and six or eight of S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance mysteries, which I’d never seen. A short spinner case had nothing but Agatha Christie books. Thee were short shelves of P.G. Wodehouse and Ross Macdonald.
Ultimately, I bought Lester del Rey’s “Marooned on Mars,” a ’60s paperback, as a memento to the glory that was. The store is due to close July 30. The LA Times wrote a nice feature on them.
