Books and the Bay

Because you know we can't travel without visiting the book stores!

We spent Thanksgiving week in San Francisco visiting our daughter, a lovely trip during which we did mostly untouristy things with people who live there, which of course is the best way to see a city. We had Friendsgiving with our daughter’s four roommates and their families. We enjoyed an a capella concert by the tenor-bass chorus Fog City Singers in which one of her friends was singing. We checked out the neighborhood food. We even took a couple of rides with Waymo, a self-driving taxi, including once after dark in very busy Chinatown. These particular rides are available only in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix for the time being, but the white Waymos with spinning sensors on their roofs are ubiquitous around San Francisco. After riding in them twice, I trust them more than all the risk-taking human drivers on the road!

We did a couple of touristy things, too. We got a great personal tour of Golden Gate Park from the local morning weatherman, John Shrable, who clocks out of work around noon and dons his jeans and flannel shirt for a fact- and story-filled walk around the park. We schlepped over to Berkeley in the rain for a fun improv concert with Bobby McFerrin and his besties that’s offered most Mondays at noon. Along the way, as will surprise no one, we stopped in at two iconic Bay area bookstores.

Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley was a total surprise. We were just killing some time walking around while our daughter clocked a couple of hours of work in a coffee shop when we stepped under the red and white-striped awning to get out of the rain and stepped into bookstore heaven.

Moe’s bills itself as “a world famous destination for book lovers since 1959,” and I don’t doubt it. Yes, yes, you’ll find new releases and fiction classics, but this is one of those bookstores that grows like Jack’s beanstalk as you start climbing it. The list of categories to explore runs in the dozens, from anthropology to writing (alphabetically speaking), with botany & mycology, fashion, linguistics, and photography in the middle, to name a few. New books, used books, all told there are 200,000 of them. Up, up we climbed, to the fourth floor, where I proverbially pressed my nose against the glass of the closed rare books room.

My husband settled in at a window to read I don’t know what, and I browsed until my arms were full. I mean, we had to support the local business, right? Fun fact: Michael Chabon, who lives in Berkeley, named one of his novels after Telegraph Avenue, where Moe’s is located. You’ve got to figure he hangs out there, but although we saw a couple of his books, we did not see him.

We had never heard of Moe’s before (the fault, no doubt, of our East Coast bias), but it has quite a storied history. It grew from a bookstore called the Paperback Bookshop, opened by a cigar-smoking, opinionated pacifist, a native of New York City named Moe Moskowitz, and his Berkeley wife, Barbara Stevens. Their younger daughter, Doris, runs Moe’s today. The store’s website proudly displays a series of news articles from 1968, when Moe was “busted for selling dirty magazines.” Police reportedly raided the shop and confiscated “47 copies of a magazine with an off-color title; 74 copies of ‘Zap Comics No. 2’; one copy of the ‘Scum Manifesto’; [and] several copies of ‘Mah Fellow Americans,’ a collection of anti-Administration cartoons by Ron Cobb,”

The Daily Californian reported:

In his store Friday, Moe commented on the police action. "I am not even sure what the charges are. They wanted to get me because of 'Snatch' magazine. But I sold out and they were disappointed when they couldn't find any copies. So they got me for 'Horseshit'."

The Bay area’s bookstores were, of course, at the center of 1960s counterculture. While I didn’t know Moe’s, I did know City Lights. But I didn’t plan to visit, having been there once before. We just happened to land on that block of Columbus Avenue because we were headed to an Italian cafe across the street. On a dark November evening, the store was lit up as if to say, “Come on in!” So we did.

I eventually found my way up the creaky stairs to the second floor poetry collection—not my usual bookstore hangout and not where I intended to go in any conscious way. It was almost as if the store’s energy pulled me up to that cozy room, site of “frequent readings, book parties, and signings” and, before that, the apartment of “one of the last of the old bohemians, Henri Lenoir, [who] founded Vesuvio (the bar next door).” Upstairs in that quiet haven, I sampled a poem here and a poem there from the books on the central table before I was drawn back to the bustle below.

Founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his business partner Peter D. Martin in 1953, City Lights is not just a bookstore; it’s also a publishing company that brought out books by the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Gregory Corso, Frank O’Hara, Noam Chomsky, Sam Shepard and many, many others. An eye-catching series of banners decorates the storefront—just the latest in a long tradition of protest and statement banners. My favorite, which quotes a former poet laureate of Los Angeles, Luis Rodriguez, reads,

Censorship is against reality. Those who ban books underestimate readers.

You just don’t find big, bold political bookstores like these in the Northeast. It was refreshing in this chaotic time to find them not just alive and kicking, but thriving more than 60 years from the time they were founded. The fact of their resilience gave me more than just a few hours pleasantly spent among their bookshelves. It gave me confidence in the future.