Read, re-read, then it’s history

Among all the possible reasons people have for shuttering bookstores these days, slipping into a diabetic coma does not come up terribly often. Andrew Dowdy, owner of Other Times Books, was about as invulnerable as anyone could be in this storm-tossed trade: Here was a guy who could make his rent, who didn’t worry about Amazon, who offered something that Barnes & Noble never could.

Still, when he was awakened by his landlord after four days and nights passed out on his apartment floor, he realized, as his faculties gradually returned at a UCLA hospital, that it was time to hang it up. Business was fine; he could easily have kept going. But Dowdy, 70, decided that his ownership of Other Times, a beloved if somewhat obscure used bookstore on a not-yet gentrified stretch of Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles, would become a thing of the past. In a sense, as its name implied, it always was.

“It’s sort of a ‘60s ideal,” said Dowdy -- who comes across like the kind of easygoing, talkative autodidact one meets in college towns -- standing in front of his locked store last month while a friend retrieved the key. “The eccentric, single-owned used bookstore

Indeed, while there has lately been some qualified good news for indies in general -- with Dutton’s Brentwood Books reaching an agreement with its landlord that will allow the store to remain in its current location, and even a few new players opening, such as Metropolis Books in downtown L.A. -- used bookstores are vulnerable. The Oriental Book Shop in Pasadena, which offered a wide range of Asian titles, has recently closed due to a rental dispute, and Book Baron, a 20,000-square-foot mainstay in Anaheim, will close this summer because of high rent and competition from the Internet.

When his friend opened the door, Dowdy -- who’d seemed perfectly stable -- casually mentioned that he would have collapsed if he’d had to stand on Pico one more minute. He was, after all, only a few days out of the hospital. His landlady found him at the end of the fourth day. “On the fifth day,” he says now, “you can have renal failure and brain damage. And on the sixth day, you won’t care.”

It’s a strange tale, but what makes the passing of Other Times noteworthy is the store and its stock -- heavy on film books but with a lot of literary fiction and old New Yorker writers -- which is being sold to Powell’s in Portland, Ore., over the next week or so. It was certainly not the space itself, that kind of classic used bookstore with fluorescent lights, a perpetually broken bathroom and several different types of flooring, all of them dirty. Still, Other Times was a kind of secret spot for L.A. literati.

“I don’t know if I can recall another shop where I truly thought things were priced reasonably all the time,” said magician, actor and book collector Ricky Jay, who found tomes on early 20th century mining stock swindles in Nevada and male impersonators in battle. “He had a very good knowledge of circuses, carnivals and striptease, all fields I have a real interest in.”

Taylor Bowie, a veteran antiquarian bookseller in Seattle, was constantly amazed at what showed up at Other Times. “At a used bookstore,” he said, “you often think, ‘It’s the same stuff I saw two weeks ago, or the same stuff as six months ago.’ Not at Andy’s.

“You would find books inscribed by Hollywood or Los Angeles figures to others; directors to actors, that kind of thing,” said Bowie, who once found a book inscribed by Cecil B. DeMille. “And he priced them very modestly.”

The main attraction

When people talk about what they liked about the shop, they keep coming back to Dowdy himself.

Dowdy, a native of Detroit who came to California as a boy, founded Other Times in December 1974 because, he said, of a literary career he’d imagined for himself that never took off. (He wrote the now out-of-print novel “Never Take a Short Price,” set at a California racetrack, as well as “Movies Are Better Than Ever,” a social history of ‘50s film.)

“I like to have uncommon but important books in their field, moderately priced.”

The stretch of Pico where he set the store was a bit out of the way then and remains about the same now: It offers a vacuum cleaner store, a McDonald’s and a teriyaki restaurant that Dowdy said “is never open.” Though it’s only a few blocks away, the middlebrow chain-store glitz of Westside Pavilion does not stretch down the street.

Despite the Westside real estate boom, the neighborhood, he said, is “the land that time forgot.”

But the store became a lively spot many days of the week. “Saturdays were like a wonderful zoo,” recalled Bowie. “People coming to sell books, to buy books; other people there to yammer.”

Dowdy said what he’d miss most was “every day, new eccentric people to talk to. People who had an interest not shared by a significant other or friends felt like they could come here and have someone to talk to. If they couldn’t find anybody else, they could talk to me.”

His expertise was as wide-ranging as his stock. Sitting by his desk was a stack of the earliest issues of the theory and criticism magazine October. He digs out a collection of pulp paperback novels from the 1960s that he calls “pre-porno erotic fiction” written by a prostitute and published in Fresno. From a shelf he pulls down the memoir of silent film-era stuntman Dick Grace.

“I have a sense that he’s read more of his stock than any used bookseller I know,” Jay said. “We talked about anything I ever got there. And he wears his learning so lightly, so unpretentiously -- he so generously discusses stuff.”

“He was unique in my experience,” said film writer Richard Schickel. “Before I lived in Los Angeles I lived in New York, and I didn’t have a relationship to a used bookstore. Andy was great because he had this personal, friendly, cheerful attitude. I bet you he had hundreds of relationships like mine.”

Dowdy is the kind of avuncular guy who clearly enjoys friendships with younger people. This was, ironically, part of what led him to get out of the business.

Last winter he went to a housewarming party for some neighbors who were about 30 years old and was amazed to see no printed or recorded matter of any kind. No books, no magazines or newspapers, no CDs.

Another time, a customer browsing in the shop told him he was not interested in books because “they’re too slow a form of information delivery.”

“People under 30 do not relate to books,” Dowdy said. “We’re in the middle of a generational shift. It’s not my world at 70. I can tell talking to them that they’re every bit as intelligent as any other generation, but their focus is different. These books are invisible to them.”

Seeing that his customers were aging, and not being replaced by younger ones, was another reason he decided it was time to go.

“I don’t think you’ll ever see the combination of circumstances to have another store like Other Times,” Bowie said. “A guy like Andy, a little spot with cheap rent, in a place that was easy to get to.”

“There was always wonderful jazz playing,” Jay said. “The world should be populated with people and places like this.”

Though he’s now attending to his health -- he had not known he was diabetic until the coma -- Dowdy seems to have recovered completely. He’s moved to Seattle, where his brother lives. He’ll miss his old life but has no plans to stay involved with the book business.

“After ‘50s coffee shops closed, people put up things like Johnny Rockets,” Dowdy said. “I have a feeling that places like this will be re-created as an act of nostalgia -- after we’re all gone.”

scott.timberg@latimes.com