It Was a Dark and Stormy Fight, and Bookshop Won

To the devoted book lovers who browse its endless, dusty shelves in search of the obscure and out-of-print, Acres of Books in downtown Long Beach has long been a beloved landmark. Now it is about to become an official one.

Despite misgivings on the part of the city’s planning and redevelopment staff, the Long Beach City Council on Tuesday unanimously voted to designate as a local cultural heritage landmark the 1920s, Streamline Moderne building that houses Acres, one of the largest used bookstores on the West Coast.

The landmark designation gives an extra--though hardly indestructible--layer of protection to the sprawling bookstore that sits in the middle of a run-down block ripe for redevelopment.

“It’s not going to save us forever,” conceded Jackie Smith, who helps manage the family-owned business, home to an estimated 750,000 volumes that lure book buyers from around the country.

“It just added another layer of bureaucracy for developers to go through and buys us time. We’re very grateful for that,” said Smith, who was going to pick up a bottle of champagne on her way back to the Long Beach Boulevard store.

The bookshop was nominated months ago for landmark designation, which can be used to delay demolition of a building for as long as a year but cannot ultimately stop it. The nomination was stalled when local planning and redevelopment officials fretted that the landmark ordinance should not be used to save a business in an architecturally mediocre building. Even Smith, who is married to a grandson of shop founder Bertram Smith, once described the former food market and dance hall as “not all that wonderful.”

Ruthann Lehrer, the city’s neighborhood and historic preservation officer, nonetheless prevailed, arguing that the 13,000-square-foot bookstore not only provides a worthwhile example of an architectural style but also serves as a unique cultural asset.

No development project is currently proposed for the Acres block. Lehrer said that if one emerges, the redevelopment staff has agreed to either try to incorporate the 1924 Acres building into the project or find a new home for the shop, which has been at its present location for 30 years.

Dark, huge and deliberately unchic, Acres has a style of its own that breeds strong loyalty among bibliophiles who journey through its dim recesses like pilgrims in Mecca.

“Please save Acres of Books. It is a holy shrine for book lovers nationwide,” Cal State Long Beach Prof. Ben Cunningham said in a telegram he sent to City Hall just before the council vote.

The shop holds 500 categories of books, stacked in towering homemade bookshelves and old fruit cartons. Readers who walk the torn linoleum floors can find the “Tragedies of Shakespeare” cheek by jowl with “Freeze With Ease,” along with books on subjects as diverse as UFOs and horses.