Prosaic, Exotic, Earthy Are His Stock in Trade

Some people in the East love to talk about how there’s no intellectual life in Los Angeles. “Nobody reads there” is the derogatory refrain.

Bernie Weisman, who’s lived in both New York and Washington but who now lives in Northridge, knows better. And he ought to know. Bernie sells a lot of reading material.

Weisman, 59, runs a newsstand--in fact, the largest newsstand west of the Mississippi--World Book and News, at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood boulevards, in the heart of Hollywood.

Weisman sells about 200 copies of the New York Times on weekdays and 300 on Sundays. And three times as many copies of this newspaper. And that’s just the start.

Weisman peddles newspapers from all over the country and the world--Chicago and Cairo, Las Vegas and London, Miami and Milan, Van Nuys and Vancouver.

World Book and News never closes. “The place is a zoo all the time,” even at 2:30 a.m. when “guys who don’t score in the bars come in to get something to read,” Weisman said.

At any time of day or night, the stand offers a lush cornucopia for the mind and the eye--3,500 different magazines, including more than 100 each on cars (Quattroruote) and computers (Incider), a half-dozen each on baseball cards (The Official 1988 Price Guide to Baseball Cards) and mercenaries (International Combat Arms), weighty journals from the political right (The American Spectator) and the left (Dissent).

Indeed, Weisman, who prides himself on being a former Marine, nonetheless carries a vast assortment of radical political newspapers and magazines, which the wise-cracking vendor calls “my Berkeley section.”

Journals on the literary life (The Paris Review) and the lavish life (The Robb Report, a $6 monthly devoted to the rich) are here in abundance. The Old West (The National Tombstone Monthly from Cochise County, Ariz.) and the New West (Satellite Dish) are represented, too, not to mention Pravda Monthly and three Italian magazines on kids’ fashions (Bambini, Bimbo and Vogue Bambini).

Weisman has a simple method of deciding which magazines to stock. Three times a year, he makes a research trip to the Pan Am Building in mid-town Manhattan, site of the world’s largest newsstand.

“They got something I don’t have, I get it,” he said. “I’ll stock anything that’s got any commercial possibilities, including a little magazine that some guy put his last $400 into.”

Of course, esoteric little magazines don’t pay the rent. Weisman’s best seller is Penthouse--about 1,500 copies a month at $4 a pop, he said, plus added sales from the French and Japanese versions. (This month Playboy, with its Jessica Hahn interview and photo spread is pummeling Penthouse at World News.)

Playboy’s ancestors and its progeny are well-represented in a section of the shop stocked with almost every conceivable type of pornography--a tribute to the diversity of perversity in the ‘8Os.

Weisman said the sheer breadth and magnitude of his stock is what attracts a number of customers. “Look, a guy comes in looking for a Cincinnati paper, a Texas Monthly, he knows I’ve got it.”

Looking for something longer? The stand has 4,000 paperbacks, ranging from metaphysics to mysteries, and a respectable chunk of history, current events and biographies.

Shoplifters aren’t much of a problem even though the stand stretches for nearly a third of a block, Weisman said. He does have security cameras, though, and declares that at every moment, day or night, a member of his family or a relative is on duty. “That’s how you deal with gonifs (thieves),” said Weisman, who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions.

Another way he deals with gonifs, drunks and other assorted meshuggenehs (crazies) is to have some very large chaps running the stand at night. One of them, David, looks like he could start on the Raiders defensive line and keeps a lead pipe handy. “I call him a bulvon (brute).”

Serendipity, said Weisman, who spent most of his life as an appliance salesman, led to his current occupation. One day in 1975 he stopped in to buy a New York Times and owner Bill Steinberg “was standing at the register forlorn; his wife just had a heart attack; he was in his late 60s and he wanted out.” Soon, Weisman bought the stand and converted it into a 24-hour operation. He assures a visitor that he makes a very nice living, although he won’t discuss just how much.

Bernie says his two great enemies are the wind and subscriptions--the former because it blows paper goods around and the latter because they cut down on his business. But after 12 years in Hollywood, he’s not fretting.

“During the Depression, people did three things: they drank, they read and they did the other thing. I’m in a depression-proof business. People will always read. You can’t stop people from learning.”