Great Bookstores Scarce as Chains Squeeze Market

Larry McCaffery thinks San Diego bookstores are lousy. And McCaffery ought to know.

He’s professor of fiction at San Diego State University and co-editor of Fiction International, one of the country’s finest collections of new fiction.

He’s upset that no bookstore in the county caters willfully to small presses, or to new or avant-garde collections of fiction or poetry. San Diego bookstores are too heavy on “high-grade commercial fare,” he said--or what’s worse, best-sellers.

“I get most of my books by mail order,” he said with a shrug.

George Mitrovich, president of the City Club, which once sponsored a seminar on the decline of English grammar, thinks San Diego bookstores are better than lousy--but only by a bookmark.

“There is no great bookstore in San Diego,” he said. “And it’s conceivable that with the demise of Pickwick’s in Hollywood, there is no great bookstore in Southern California.”

Others tend to agree, but stop short of stating it quite so strongly. Others disagree sharply, saying San Diego has at least two, maybe three, four or five bookstores that put it on a par with some of the great bookstore cities in the country.

So, what is a great bookstore? Or for that matter, a great bookstore city? One definition of a great bookstore seems to be one that satisfies intellectuals--classics, esoteric biographies, lush displays--while also appeasing those who relish an “off the wall” discovery, the unusual, the eccentric, the bizarre. Others want something simpler, not necessarily best sellers but the best, for instance, in travel, photography, art and music.

To get a sampling of opinion, a sprinkling of the city’s readers were asked which bookstores they prefer and how they compare to San Diego’s. The results indicate that bookstore preferences, as much as reading, are a matter of taste and intellectual individualism. Rating bookstores may be as delicately subjective as asking somebody who they spend their time with and why.

This story focuses on San Diego’s independents and how they compare with their counterparts around the land. Used books are another story, as are the stores that carry them. And the chains? Well, nobody seemed to care, except to cast them as villains, or as obstacles keeping San Diego from the pinnacle of great bookstore cities.

One constant did emerge. Most mourn the decline of independent bookstores--those that aren’t chain-controlled, in the manner of B. Dalton, Waldenbooks and Crown Books, which swallow up smaller fish like so many corporate piranha.

“The chains,” said McCaffery angrily, “are no better than television. They are actively destroying serious writing in this country. The mentality underlying those chains is the same mentality underlying McDonald’s. And they are ruining serious fiction in America.”

A woman close to the book scene, who asked not to be identified, tells a story of what happened one day in the office of a major publisher. She was there, recommending a book by a friend.

“Sounds good,” the man said. “But let me make a phone call.”

He called the head of B. Dalton, one of the largest bookstore chains. “Can you sell 15,000 copies” of such-and-such? The voice on the other end apparently said no.

The publisher turned to the woman and said: “Sorry. We just can’t do it. If they don’t like it, we can’t afford to.”

Still, Kathy Conlon, assistant store manager of Waldenbooks at Mission Valley Center, said McCaffery is wrong to be so critical of chains.

“I think I can see where he’s coming from,” she said. “He’s looking at the corporation aspect. Well, it is a business and it’s going to be run like a business. Decisions are going to be made on what sells, and sometimes it’s trash. If that’s what sells, that’s the way it is.

“But credit has to be given to the individuals who run the stores. Our customers are not stupid. When I’m ordering, I don’t say this is trash, this is mindless, and wow, people will love it! You can, however, read Sidney Sheldon and get really caught up in it. It’s a release.

“On the other hand, we’re willing to give serious writers a chance. We fight to keep up with what’s new and good.”

Conlon admitted, however, that Waldenbooks (based in Stamford, Conn.) gives any book a three-month run. Period. If it hasn’t passed muster by then, it is usually shipped out. McCaffery considers this devastating to new or unconventional authors or to any small-press publication.

“We try to keep up with what’s current,” Conlon said. “That includes a lot of best sellers. A lot of times, books go back as company returns that we would have liked to keep (in the local store). But hey, that’s reality.”

In further defense of the chains, literary agent Sandra Dijkstra said: “I’m not entirely pessimistic about them. They are bringing books to the hinterlands.”

She’s frightened, however, that a few people--book buyers for the chains--are controlling the reading habits of Americans.

“I know it sounds dismal,” she said, “but the independents are the ones keeping first novels alive.”

So the question is, what happens when the independents die? It’s a question many find too gloomy to contemplate.

Chains aside, what is a great bookstore city? Mitrovich mentioned an obvious choice: New York. His favorite in Manhattan is Scribner’s, which he called the best bookstore in the country.

McCaffery also cited New York and specifically St. Mark’s Bookshop, which traffics in the kind of small-press literature he finds “abysmally lacking” in San Diego. As a kind of test, he recommended asking stores if any carried works from the Fiction Collective or Sun & Moon Press out of Los Angeles.

“Not a lot of San Diego stores carry our books, but some have in the past,” said Douglas Messerli, publisher of Sun & Moon Press. “From time to time the two university bookstores (UC San Diego and SDSU) have carried them, as has the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bookstore downtown. It’s quite right, however, that distribution (in San Diego) is small. We wish it were better.”

Even so, is it fair to compare San Diego, the nation’s eighth largest city, with the Big Apple and all of its sprouting literary seeds? After all, it is the center of publishing. But as Mitrovich said, San Diego has “increasing pretensions” toward calling itself a “great” city.

“You can’t have a great city absent of having great bookstores,” he said.

While conceding it may be unfair to compare local bookstores with those of Gotham, he said it is “eminently fair” to compare San Diego with, say, Seattle or Denver. In both cases, he said, “America’s Finest City” comes up short. Instead of finest, it might be closer to mediocre.

“The Tattered Cover in Denver is an outstanding bookstore,” he said. “It’s surprising to find it in a city of moderate size. San Diego doesn’t even have a bookstore as good as Levinson’s in Sacramento. Levinson’s carries all the works of Faulkner, all the works of Fitzgerald, all the works of Willa Cather. I dare say you can’t find that in San Diego.”

Kathy Anderson, manager of the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Bookstore downtown, disagreed. She said HBJ epitomizes the greatness critics find lacking in San Diego. She noted that although it is owned by a major publisher, HBJ carries books by a “wide variety of other houses.” The same is true of Scribner’s in New York.

“Our policy is service,” she said. “We do things that are lost in chain operations. We special order with no charge attached. Along with service goes selection. We carry a full backlist of all publishers. You can order any classic at any time. We’re always finding the right book for the right person. We make an effort to get that book in the person’s hands. The customer is almost always pleased.”

Anderson said McCaffery was “misinformed.” HBJ carries “the full line” of Sun & Moon Press, she said, as well as Black Sparrow Press out of Santa Barbara and a covey of other small publishers. She’s receptive, she said, to any small publisher.

“I can’t believe those people said those things,” she said. “I think they ought to know what they’re talking about before they say something. I wish they’d come in the store, so I could show them around.”

Some people want more than books in a great bookstore. They want magazines.

Mitrovich said San Diego doesn’t even have a bookstore with a decent periodical stand. He said Horton Plaza’s greatest shortcoming may be its lack of such a stand. He said Butler & Mayes at La Jolla Village Square offers the best.

The Mitrovich definition of a great bookstore is one that features what’s current as well as a vast array of classics in hard-bound volumes. A great bookstore, he said, must carry a strong section of literary criticism, of history, of books that sail beyond contemporary issues.

“You would find Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s three-volume history of the New Deal,” he said. “You would find Arthur Link’s six-volume work of the life and presidency of Woodrow Wilson. You would find the six volumes of the Lisle letters, published by the University of Chicago.

“At the time the Lisle letters came out, you couldn’t find a single set in San Diego. I found it at Levinson’s in Sacramento.” (The Lisle letters were the lifetime collection of a man who lived at the port of Calais during the reign of King Henry VIII.)

Several years ago, SDSU’s McCaffery published a book of critically acclaimed interviews with American writers called “Anything Can Happen.” With the exception of John Irving and “The World According to Garp,” few of those authors’ works are sold in San Diego. McCaffery thinks Robert Coover is the best novelist writing in America today. Few local bookstores, he said, even carry his works. And he says few stores carry the “gems” of small or university presses--or of poetry.

Fran Adler, a local poet who co-authored “Home Street Home,” a study of the homeless in poetry and photography, disagreed. She said The Book Works in Del Mar--which many say is the best bookstore in the county--and Blue Door Book Store in Hillcrest compare favorably with Moe’s in Berkeley, which she said is one of the best stores anywhere for poetry.

Besides New York, McCaffery likes San Francisco (Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore and Publishers) and Santa Fe as being some of the best towns for independent stores selling new and decidedly different literature. He was asked if San Diego County had any stores that at least whetted his appetite.

“Oh, a couple are OK,” he said, “but they’re just OK. HBJ is one. The Book Works in Del Mar is another. The Blue Door is another. But they’re just OK . They’re hardly great. Compared to a lot of cities--and not just New York--San Diego is a bookstore wilderness.”

McCaffery finds it “appalling” that even if a store stocks a “small” or unconventional author, the shelf life of such a book is “alarmingly low.” He has asked receptive owners to stock various titles, and they have, only to remove them within a month--unless, of course, lines for such titles approached those of a Simon and Garfunkel reunion.

Some say the McCafferys and Mitroviches are entirely too critical. They say San Diego may not rate with great bookstore cities--New York, San Francisco, Berkeley, maybe even Seattle and Denver--in quantity, but it does rate high in quality, albeit on a smaller scale.

HBJ’s Anderson conceded San Diego is hardly a great bookstore city.

“It is becoming more of one,” she said. “As more people arrive from cities better known as book centers, San Diego will get better. One of the best book towns in the West is Seattle. We’re not up to their level yet but we are getting better. Maybe as we see more of an overflow of people from the East, we’ll see it happen even sooner. I certainly hope so.”

San Diego ranks as the eighteenth largest book-buying market in the country, according to the most recent survey of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, which said estimated sales of new books in San Diego in 1984 reached $42 million. This compares with New York (No. 1), $278 million; Los Angeles (No. 2), $176 million; San Francisco (No. 4), $126 million; Seattle (No. 8), $67 million, and Dallas (No. 10), $63 million.

The figures are interesting in their failure to correspond to population figures. San Francisco, Boston, Washington, Seattle, San Jose, Denver, Minneapolis and Baltimore are all cities below San Diego in population but rate higher--sometimes dramatically so--as book-buying markets.

“You’d think with all of the colleges and all of the college students in San Diego,” Mitrovich said, “the college bookstores would be good. But they, too, are disappointments. You have to look hard to find what you want.”

Some say it can be found. Several persons interviewed called The Book Works, at Flower Hill shopping center in Del Mar, one of the best bookstores in the country. Sandra Dijkstra, frequently on the road promoting new authors, is a bookstore visitor coast to coast. She thinks The Book Works compares favorably with the best.

“Milane Christiansen (owner of The Book Works) has wonderful taste,” Dijkstra said. “Her selection of fiction is just fabulous. She’s more than receptive to new writers on the way up. She has readings and signings, jazz on Friday nights. Her store, like the best bookstores, has a personality all its own.”

Christiansen is limited, some say, in having a small store with small inventory. But words such as quality and taste keep coming up. Her store is clean, elegant, well-lighted. It may be no coincidence that her idea of a great bookstore is one in San Francisco called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books.

Christiansen is a slim, attractive woman with a wry laugh and a sharp sense of humor. She has the blonde good looks and ever-so-slight accent of Scandinavian forebears. She was born in Minnesota but recently celebrated her 10th anniversary with The Book Works to Del Mar.

She picked Del Mar for a reason, calling it a “savvy” book-buying market.

“It’s one of the best spots in the country,” she said. “We have (UCSD in La Jolla), we have Salk and Scripps institutes, we have lots of Europeans. We even carry a few books in French and Spanish.”

She believes in “quality fiction” and in art, travel and photography books that few have heard of, much less carry. She boasts of what she calls “unconventional titles,” including a series of H.V. Morton books on travel, such as “A Stranger in Spain” and “A Traveller in Italy.”

One of her favorite authors is Canadian W.P. Kinsella, author of a delightful little baseball novel called “Shoeless Joe.” Christiansen likes his other books just as well and makes an effort to carry them. Kinsella has been to The Book Works to speak, as have Gore Vidal and local author Alfons Heck, a former member of the Hitler Youth.

Heck chronicled his boyhood in a book called “A Child of Hitler.” When he spoke recently to a crowd of about 275 at The Book Works, he was greeted by local members of the Ku Klux Klan as well as sympathizers of the American Nazi Party. One accused Heck of “betraying” such extremist elements by renouncing his past.

It is that kind of night, that kind of spark, that gives a bookstore literary charisma. A few years ago Christiansen entered into an on-site partnership with the Pannikin coffee houses. Now you can buy a book or a magazine and stroll next door to read it, over a cup of Brazilian coffee and a croissant .

Just about everyone agreed bookstores should be not only pleasant--warm, magnetic, even alluring and mysterious--but also centers of learning. The best, they say, have not only a personality but a flair, an essence, an ambiance.

Such a task is made difficult by the preponderance of chain stores, which buy in bulk and thus pass along immense savings to consumers. Small independent stores don’t have such a luxury and as a result, the weaker among them face termination. Charging full price is hardly strategic when you’re volleying with Crown and B. Dalton.

Many bookstores in San Diego County, like many across the country, have gone to the great bookstore in the sky. Despite its lofty reputation, Christiansen said, rainy Seattle is one city that Crown Books has devastated. Many independents there have died.

Clients of Warwick’s in La Jolla are fretting over the imminent debut of yet another Crown Books, on Girard Avenue, the same street Warwick’s calls home. Barbara Christman, the store manager, was diplomatically calm.

“Frankly, Crown is fine, because it’s bringing in a lot of people who were maybe intimidated by bookstores,” she said. “Once they get used to going in (to Crown), they’ll find us. Some independents have actually found that sales increase when Crown comes in.

“The more people who read, the better that is for all bookstores. Selling books is not like selling shoes. Everyone wears shoes, but not everyone reads the same book.”

The shoe story seems fittingly ironic. On a recent afternoon, a man walking a downtown street spotted a shoe store. A bookstore that once occupied its place had to leave for lack of business.

“Leave it to San Diego,” he grumbled, “to take away a bookstore and put in a shoe store.”

The fact that it was a chain shoe store may have been the most telling point of all.