Offerings Fill a Warehouse : Bay Area Bookseller--He’s in It Up to His Ears

He’s not very wordy, but Philip M. Roskie has several billion words at his fingertips.

Roskie’s fabulous collection, in practically every modern language, is contained in half a million used and discount books that fill the shelves and aisles of the Roskie & Wallace Bookstore in nearby San Leandro.

The business, located in a corrugated metal warehouse for more than three years, moved from Oakland after it lost its past home to downtown fix-ups.

“When Oakland redevelopment began talking of moving us out, I got the horrors,” Roskie said. “I couldn’t imagine any other location as well-suited as that old building, with low rent and a lot of space.

“As it turned out, when we found this place and bought it, it just worked out perfectly.”

To get in, you have to slip through warehouse doors down an alley, then past several 1950s-vintage Hudson autos, which Roskie says are his hobby.

“I’m not proud of the exterior of the business,” he said. “Now the inside, I am proud of that. People claim we have the most books of any shop in the Bay Area. We probably do have the best variety.”

His stock includes thousands of volumes in foreign languages, evenly divided between hardbound and paperbacks covering almost every imaginable subject.

“We have an awfully large number of books on carpentry and rebuilding houses,” he said. “We do have a large section on cars, with repair manuals and things going back years and years. We also have around 40,000 religious books and about the same number of modern romances.”

Roskie began selling words, in newspapers and magazines, as a youngster in Eureka from 1928 to 1936. Within weeks after the family moved to Oakland, his father took him to a bookstore that was going out of business.

“They were selling any book in the store for 19 cents,” he recalled. “I picked out the largest books I could find, bound volumes of Harpers Young People. At the age of 14, I figured I’d get my money’s worth.”

Roskie opened his own Oakland Book Co. with a partner in the early 1940s. Although he tried to enlist in the military during World War II, poor eyesight kept him at home buying and selling books.

Over the years, Roskie & Wallace became known as the place to find almost any kind of book.

“Cookbooks, for instance; we have several San Francisco chefs who come to us looking for specific books. We have a lot of art books and perhaps 40,000 children’s books. We probably have more customers for books on classical music than we do on modern rock music.”

Roskie and his wife, Marion, do most of the work at the bookstore.

“We buy 10,000 to 25,000 books a month, getting a lot from the big auctions at post offices, storage places and estate sales,” Roskie explained.

Wallace died years ago, but Roskie kept his partner’s name on the letterhead because “he was like a father to me.”

“Besides,” he added, “with two names, it sounds like a more substantial operation.”