Shelf portrait

The late Bob Klein and the cardboard John Wayne at the entrance to Sam: Johnson’s Book Shop, ca. 2004 (Image courtesy of the author)

Today: Journalist and editor Maria Bustillos.

Issue No. 182

Sam: Johnson’s Book Shop on Venice Boulevard
Maria Bustillos

Sam: Johnson’s Book Shop on Venice Boulevard

by Maria Bustillos

When my best girlfriend Amy came to hang out in Glasgow last month we recalled a pleasant afternoon we spent some 20 years ago with Bob Klein, the proprietor of Sam: Johnson’s Book Shop on Venice Boulevard in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Amy and I had a lot of schemes back then. We threw elaborate dinner parties and served Tournedos Rossini, we bought a warehouse full of books. We’d gone to the store to interview Bob, thinking we ought to write about Los Angeles together. We imagined we might try writing a coffee table book about all these places we loved, but we never did.

Last week I researched a bit and was sad to find that Bob died in 2016.

Even in the early aughts the atmosphere of Sam’s belonged to an earlier time. I wasn’t surprised to learn that day that Bob had spent his youth, as I had mine, wandering the warrens of Acres of Books in Long Beach. Though Sam’s was considerably tidier than the chaotic Acres of Books (books securely stored on shelves, all squeaky clean with dustjackets carefully preserved in mylar Brodarts), it definitely had the same antic sense of the past, a certain intellectual contingency, a wildness, a rolling of the dice. Plus nostalgia. I used to go a lot, back in the days when you really could get most anywhere in L.A. in 20 minutes.

Image: bookstorememories.com

“The elegance of Sam’s lies in its modesty and utility,” I wrote back then (pompously, but accurately). There were no paperback bodice-rippers to be seen, nor virginal, gilded first editions preserved still and quiet under glass. It was a place for solid, comfortable reading copies, mostly classics of English and European literature: heavy cloth bindings, type that you could feel sunk into creamy paper, sculpting it like Braille.

There was a good selection of 18th century stuff, naturally, plus medieval literature, a shelf of Loeb classics, scholarly art books, and a charming fantasy section featuring H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, and Algernon Blackwell; these were the books Bob loved especially. He was a handsome man with a leonine air, not tall but strong and well built, and he taught for many decades at Santa Monica College. He had a teacher’s voice, a richly modulated baritone filled with bursts of booming laughter.

He opened the shop in 1977 with his partner and childhood friend, Larry Myers. In the years I frequented the shop he reigned at his big desk every Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday. I bought my first copy of The Book of Tea there, and I think a number of other Japanese books.

One always wonders how anyone manages to start a business of any kind, let alone one so impractical as a bookshop.

“So my girlfriend of the time said, Listen, say, you’ve always wanted to open a bookshop, why don’t you do that, and I said, that’s a good idea. So I approached Larry and I said, why don’t we open a bookshop? And he said, no, I don’t want to be a merchant—nope, nope...

“I didn’t have much money, being a part-time schoolteacher, but I’d take thirty dollars, and go to auctions and things like that, and try to get some books, a few books and then Larry changed his mind, and said I will come in, I will, and to make a long story short, we opened with ten thousand books, and each of us was responsible for acquiring five thousand books... Was it ten thousand, or twenty thousand?” he bellowed amiably in the direction of the back office.

From a distance: “Ten thousand.”

A beautiful baby grand piano, once belonging to his opera-singing mother, held pride of place at the front of the shop; recitals were held regularly. There was a life-sized cardboard image of John Wayne stationed by the front door.

“I read mostly English literature: Renaissance, 17th century, 18th century, 19th century—not very much 20th century, except people like Arthur Machen... A few other 20th century authors,” he told us. “I like medieval literature, the great world literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey and Dante, and that’s the kind of stuff that I read, that’s the world that I live in.”

“Hey, didn’t Machen translate some really bizarre thing... Brillat-Savarin, I think?”

“Casanova, he translated Casanova, an introduction to Brillat-Savarin, no he didn’t translate that, just the introduction... He did translate Le Moyen de Parvenir, and he did translate the Heptameron of Margaret of Navarre... We have an Arthur Machen section... Did I tell you I went to Arthur Machen’s house last year, I made a pilgrimage and took pictures, remember the part in Hill of Dreams where Lucien sleeps in the amphitheatre? I have pictures of the amphitheatre.”

There was a fine selection of cookbooks, though Bob didn’t care about food.

“I don’t have the time or the patience. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays I’m here all day, and then I teach classes from seven to ten o’clock, and I come home and I feed the cats and I microwave some potatoes, then I usually take a TV dinner and I throw that over the potatoes. That’s my idea of food, and with it I’ll take a biscuit or a piece of toast and I’ll put peanut butter on that… And then I’ll have some wine.”

He’d only just embarked on Pepys.

“It’ll take you forever!”

“No, six weeks.”

Afterwards he planned to relax with Wycherley.

Bob Klein that day.

Even back then, though, I was shocked to find Bob got quite worked up over the issue of “political correctness.” When confronted with subject of bowdlerized fairy tales (the boring newfangled ones with no boiling alive or throwing in ovens) he really flipped out.

“You asked me what I hate, that’s what I hate. Those people and what they are trying to do to the civilized world. Those left-wing fanatics. I hate them.”

It’s so long ago and yet I remember the chill of apprehension I felt—very slight—that someone I liked so much could consider himself an arbiter of “the civilized world” or say that he hated “left-wing fanatics.” An impression, like dark and incoherent blobs coming up in a Polaroid that would only come into focus many years later. When I’d asked him, What books do you hate, I’d only meant like Ooh I can’t stand Dickens or whatever.

FLAMING SANITY THANK YOU

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