Old Hobbits Die Hard

The demise of one of our best bookstores, the science-fiction emporium A Change of Hobbit in Santa Monica, which will close this month, can’t be seen as part of a national trend or blamed upon large market forces nobody could control. It might be easier to swallow if it could. We are now well into a recession, after all, and the independent bookstores of America have been fighting a losing battle with the engulfing national chains. But A Change of Hobbit, always a one-of-a-kind outfit, will be no less idiosyncratic in its passing, a special case to the bitter end.

Speciality bookshops can be dens of iniquitous snideness and snobbery, but A Change of Hobbit always felt wide open and friendly. It was revered by its loyal customers for the breadth of its inventory and for the sometimes daunting expertise of its staff. And for its durability: Owner Sherry Gershon Gottlieb launched the business 19 years ago Feb. 1, on a capital investment of $1,500, over a Laundromat in Westwood Village. It was the first bookstore anywhere devoted exclusively to science fiction.

“I was used to being a hippie in those days,” Gottlieb says. “Two of us could live quite happily on $500 a month. I had no telephone for the first six months because I couldn’t afford one. I had one copy of each book and when I sold it I got another one. It was really easy to start it in ‘72, and then as the demand picked up, the store grew.”

The influence of A Change of Hobbit has been widely felt. The store helped shape the reading and the tastes of a generation of SF readers and writers. And two far-flung stores owned by former Hobbit managers--Dangerous Visions in Sherman Oaks and Dark Carnival in Berkeley--will keep the flame burning. As the field evolved from fringe to best-seller status, the store moved and expanded twice, first to Westwood Boulevard and then to its most familiar location, in a clapboard building decorated with a colorful spacey mural on Lincoln Boulevard near the entrance to the 10 Freeway in Santa Monica.

“My average reader has gone up in age over the years and I think the books available have matured greatly,” Gottlieb says. “Cyberpunk, for instance, is the hottest movement in the field in recent years, extremely popular with my customers--dark visions of the future that are quite complex and demanding intellectually. Now people who came in as high school and college students were coming back in with their own kids.”

The big bookstore chains, which have killed many general-interest independent bookstores (the late, lamented West Side landmark Papa Bach springs to mind), scarcely ruffled the feathers of specialty shops like A Change of Hobbit. Gottlieb says that she may have lost sales on 15 SF best sellers in 10 years: “I might sell 40 copies of a new Stephen King novel now instead of 400. But my customers are also extremely loyal. Many of them will buy books from me at full cover price that they could get cheaper at Crown.”

In recent years, however, the indicators have shifted downward for the first time. The economics of Los Angeles’ West Side, where the living is easy but increasingly expensive, exaggerated the effects of the nationwide recession: “All of our customers are still coming in, but they’ve been buying 20% or 25% fewer books. Obviously a 20% drop in income is quite a handicap for any business, even if everything else remains equal.”

And everything didn’t. “The landlord of our old building became convinced that the place was worth $900,000, and he decided to sell it. We had two years left on our lease and he didn’t want us there because he felt the site would be harder to sell with a long-term tenant. But he did say he would let us out of our lease early if we found another place to go.”

As it happened, the Hobbitt quickly found an excellent new site through longtime patron Alan Katz, a member of the Santa Monica City Council. Katz steered Gottlieb to a spacious storefront in the basement of a municipal parking structure on Second Street in downtown Santa Monica. But the move was expensive, and while the rent was cheap for the area, it was steep for Gottlieb.

“And in the meantime,” she continues, “our landlord discovered that he couldn’t get $900,000 for his building, so he decided not to let us out of our lease after all. So in addition to all the money we had to pay to get into this new place, we also had to pay off our old lease.”

(Gottlieb’s legal adviser, her lawyer father, considered filing suit against the landlord and came to the conclusion that a courtroom victory would take so long to achieve that it still couldn’t save the store.)

“If it hadn’t been for the recession,” Gottlieb says, “we might have been able to bounce back from the move. Without the move, we might have been able to survive the recession. But the combination killed us. I said to my landlord, ‘You know if you insist on doing this to us, we’ll have to close.’ And he just said, ‘Well, that’s life.’ ”

Now that her retailing days are over Gottlieb admits she would love to put her SF expertise to work in publishing--if there were any publishing firms out here to work for. Her first book will be out from Viking in July--”Hell No, We Won’t Go!: Evading the Draft During the Vietnam War”--and she says free-lance writing is always a possibility, “but I think it would be nice to make some money for a change. If I’m going to have to work for somebody else anyway, I figure I might as well get paid.”

But at the moment, the store still is uppermost in Gottlieb’s mind. “My customers tell me this store had a personality. I think what made this store different was my customers. When we got behind with certain publishers, and our shipments were late, people would simply wait to buy the books. When we had to move, customer volunteers did all the carpentry and the painting and all the packing and moving and unpacking. Even the interior design was donated. I threw a fund-raiser at $75 a pop and sold 100 tickets. It was phenomenal.”

For Sherry Gottlieb, A Change of Hobbit was the meeting ground of a community of readers:

“I’ve never been a part of organized science-fiction fandom. I think those people are less involved in reading in the field than in socializing in it, and A Change of Hobbit has always been a store run by and for readers. Knowledge of the field was the first criterion for working here, and I always placed an emphasis on customer service. We learned their names and we got to know what they read so that we could suggest things. We wanted to let them know how important they were to us.”

A Change of Hobbit continues its liquidation sale through February at 1433 2nd St. in Santa Monica. Call (213) 473-2873 for information.