Search for Space on the Planet : Science-Fiction Bookstore Explores Ways to Stay Open, Preserve Literacy

In Walter M. Miller Jr.’s classic “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” a post-nuclear-holocaust cloister of monks strives to preserve reading and the written word.

A piece of writing that survives and becomes object of the monks’ devotion, it turns out, is nothing but a shopping list for lox and bagels. But its preservation comes to represent much more.

Sometimes, Sherry Gottlieb feels she is on a similar mission.

Lease Due to End

Gottlieb is founder and owner of A Change of Hobbit, one of the largest and oldest science fiction and fantasy bookstores in the world. Like the monks and their grocery list, Gottlieb is fighting to save her store.

In some ways, the battle is also being waged against the forces that would destroy independent book shops and erode the national literacy rate.

The building in Santa Monica that has housed A Change of Hobbit for half of its 16 years is for sale, and the shop’s lease runs out in the spring. Gottlieb, a raven-haired woman with a pet boa constrictor, is looking for a new setting for her store’s 50,000-plus volumes.

She says she must also raise an estimated $40,000 for moving expenses or her store--which fans describe as a shrine to the genre as well as a place to buy books--may be doomed.

Gottlieb is negotiating with a Santa Monica city-owned corporation to rent space near the downtown 3rd Street Promenade, a run-down, outdoor mall that is undergoing major renovation. But talks are still preliminary.

“It’s very important for us to stay on the Westside,” Gottlieb said, seated in a gazebo inside her store, before a replica of Flash Gordon’s radio. “We’ve always been here, and 60% of our customers live on this side of town.”

To move farther away, she said, would mean starting over again.

In the meantime, Gottlieb is getting help from some important friends. Luminaries in the science fiction and fantasy world, such as authors Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, Dean R. Koontz and Robert McCammon, are donating their time for a “Save the Hobbit” fund-raising benefit on Oct. 23.

They will give free readings at the $100-a-ticket event, which also will feature the auction of several autographed books donated by horror great Stephen King.

“They’ve got an unusual problem. Moving a bookstore is expensive,” Koontz, author of “Oddkins,” a tale of magical toys on a voyage across a mysterious city, said in a telephone interview from his home in Orange County.

‘Literacy in Enough Trouble’

“It behooves us now and then to do something for the trade; here’s an opportunity, and it will be kind of fun. (A Change of Hobbit) is kind of historic within the genres it serves, and it would be a shame to see it fold.”

“Literacy is in enough trouble without closing down bookstores, especially those that appeal to young people,” said Susan Allison, editor in chief for science fiction at Ace Books, one of the publishers that supplies A Change of Hobbit.

“(Gottlieb) does a real public service. She’s an important figure in terms of marketing science fiction in a loving and intense way.”

The correct term, Gottlieb says, for describing what her store specializes in is “speculative fiction,” a world that encompasses science fiction, fantasy and horror, a world of wizards, elves, aliens from outer space, monsters, vampires, robots and futuristic societies.

Gottlieb became lost in the world of speculative fiction as a child. She devoured the entire Oz series, then read every fairy tale at her local library.

After graduating from Berkeley in 1969 with a drama degree that landed her nothing but a boring secretarial job, Gottlieb came up with the idea of a bookstore modeled after the now-defunct Dark They Were Golden-eyed in London. And so, A Change of Hobbit was born on Feb. 1, 1972, in a 12- by 15-foot room above a Laundromat in Westwood. It moved later to Westwood Boulevard, and eight years ago to its current site on a nondescript strip of Lincoln Boulevard among auto-repair shops and fast-food drive-ins.

Independent bookstores in recent years have had to face the challenge of the discount chain stores. Many stores have been forced out of business. Increasingly, the only way for the smaller shops to survive is to specialize.

“Most independents now are specialty bookstores,” Gottlieb said. “It is the only way to compete. They (the discount chains) compete with prices, the specialty stores compete with breadth and service.

“Our customers are extremely loyal. That’s how we have managed to stay in business while other independents are crashing down all around us.”

Gottlieb’s customers include age 30-something adults who have been frequenting the shop since they were in high school. It’s the type of place where a customer can walk in, describe a bizarre plot, and one of Gottlieb’s seven employees will probably be able to identify the science fiction thriller it came from.

A Change of Hobbit also features monthly autograph parties with authors, and handles a long list of “planet-wide” mail orders. Business is good, given a lift perhaps by real-life space exploration and the success of sci-fi movies.

Specialty bookstores also make their own cultural contribution by offering titles and promoting authors that no one else does, by both supplying and creating the knowledgeable reader.

This year, the big sellers at A Change of Hobbit included Mel Gilden’s “Surfing Samurai Robots,” featuring Zoot the alien/private investigator who inhabits a “world of sex, violence and good rays.”

And there was that tale of murder, mystery and mayhem at a fantasy-fiction convention, the award-winning “Bimbos of the Death Sun,” by Sharyn McCrumb.

But Gottlieb has detected a disturbing trend. Science fiction and fantasy, often seen as the last bastion of literature for kids who won’t read anything else, still appeals to young people. But Gottlieb says the average age of her customers has increased 10 years over the last decade.

“Reading as entertainment is seriously endangered,” she said.

“High school kids are not reading science fiction for entertainment. And if they’re not reading science fiction, you have to think they aren’t reading. . . . When children are conditioned to have to see their stories, they lose the magic of the printed word.”

If the negotiations with Santa Monica’s Bayside District Corp. are successful, A Change of Hobbit will move to a 5,200-square-foot space on the ground floor of a parking garage on the backside of the 3rd Street mall, facing the Pussycat Theater on 2nd Street.

Gottlieb said the rent would be about 40% higher than she now pays, but she would hope to make up the difference with walk-in trade.

The site is cheaper than regular retail space because of its location in a parking garage. Nevertheless, several tenants have come and gone, complaining of noise from the garage and the number of transients in the area.

According to one official familiar with the negotiations, the deal would solve Gottlieb’s need for an affordable space, while solving the city’s problems with keeping tenants.

“They certainly would be the kind of tenants we’d be interested in,” said Tom Carroll, executive director of the Bayside District Corp., a nonprofit, public-benefit corporation formed to oversee renovation of the downtown mall area.

Carroll said Change of Hobbit would also benefit from additional parking and from an anticipated upswing in business as the district rejuvenates.