Bookstore Is Bound to the Past

“I’ve done ‘Ulysses’ but I struck out on ‘Finnegans Wake,’ ” Jim Lorson confessed, recounting his experiences with Irish novelist James Joyce’s two most difficult books.

Smiling, his dark blue eyes set close in a friendly owl’s face, the 60-year-old Lorson peered over his desk. Thousands of books, set in dark-stained wooden shelves that rose high from the floor, surrounded him.

Lorson’s Books & Prints bookstore is tucked away on quiet Wilshire Avenue just off Harbor Boulevard in Fullerton.

Lorson, who says his quest for fine books takes him all over England and the Eastern United States, is warmly unaffected, soft-spoken and self-effacing. His shop of rare, first-edition books, fine prints and beautiful, limited-run volumes painstakingly printed by hand press, rates “low on the pecking order of antiquarian bookstores” in the world, he said.

There are few of these bookstores to be found anymore, in Orange County or anywhere else. But in north Orange County, half a dozen good antiquarian bookstores are within easy mortar range of Lorson’s shop--four in Fullerton, one in Orange and another in Anaheim.

Low rents and a kind of symbiotic relationship--with the stores feeding off each others’ clients--have created a bibliophile’s haven here.

The competition is genteel.

“I don’t think booksellers here compete in the normal sense of the word,” said John T. Cannon, the young proprietor of Aladdin Books, just a few blocks from Lorson’s. His cat, Spice, curled lazily in a wicker basket behind the counter as the Benny Goodman Trio thumped out “Together Again” over the shop’s stereo system.

Cannon refers deferentially to Lorson as “Mr. Lorson,” and Lorson predicts a bright future in the antiquarian book trade for Cannon, a UCLA film school graduate.

Old movie posters struggle for display space with the 20,000 books in Cannon’s shop.

On a recent day, as a heat wave pressed down on the north county, Lorson sat in his bookstore, an old air conditioner humming hard to add some cool snap to the heavy air.

He talked about leaving Canton, Ohio, as a young man to join the Army so he could go to college on the GI Bill. At Tulane University in New Orleans, he dropped out of school a semester shy of graduating with a degree in English and came to California.

In 1977, after some 25 years as an administrator with electronics firms, he opened up a bookstore in Fullerton with his wife, Joan.

All along, he was collecting books for the day the store opened.

“I keep trying to improve my stock as time goes by,” he said, gazing out the window on an empty street. But he seeks quality, not quantity. “Enlarging the collection is not a goal. I suppose in my fantasy I’d end up with one book only, but it’d be one hell of a book.”

Then he grinned. “Not much of the world goes by out there,” he said, nodding toward the street. “If I were dependent on foot traffic, I’d be in trouble.”

Instead, he relies on a steady and growing clientele with a taste for fine books and prints. A first edition of Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” for example. Or a $1,250 first edition of Jonathan Swift’s “Polite Conversations,” printed in 1738.

“Good books kind of jump out at you,” he said, gently opening red leather-bound, gold leaf volumes by Sir Thomas Malory. “You can spot a good book across the room.”

Most of his customers come from the area, Lorson said. While his own reading tastes now run more to popular mysteries by Elmore Leonard and Dick Francis, he finds Fullerton a good place to sell good books, he said.

He recalled what a former work acquaintance said when Lorson moved to Orange County: “Oh, Fullerton! I know that town. Nothing but churches and bookstores. It’s really going downhill.”

Lorson wrinkled his eyes into a smile.