Shelf portrait

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.

“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.