NEIGHBORS : Writers on the Wall : Barnaby Conrad’s mural in a Santa Barbara bookstore brings customers face-to-face with literary figures.

If the walls at the new Earthling Bookshop in Santa Barbara could talk, they’d say something literary--at least that would be true for the wall in the cafe section.

That’s where Rincon resident Barnaby Conrad is working on a mural of authors, including himself. So far, he’s graced the wall with life-size likenesses of Oscar Wilde, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Jonathan Winters, Mark Twain and a bookshelf full of others. And there are more to come.

“I’m working on Truman Capote now,” Conrad said. “He’s fairly difficult, because some people remember him as a beautiful young boy lying on a couch and some people remember him as a querulous drunken old man on talk shows.”

Conrad paints the figures on Masonite, cuts them out and attaches them, in 3-D fashion, to the wall. Some of his characters are more recognizable than others. “One day, I think it was near the opening, a couple came in with their grandson,” Earthling owner Penny Davies said. “And the grandson could name every one of them. He was telling his grandparents who these people were. I don’t know how he knew.”

Davies said the painting of Winters is among the figures most people identify immediately. But among locals, the most familiar painting is that of Fernando. No, he’s not an author--nor a former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher.

“He’s the waiter from Montecito who waits on everybody’s cocktail parties,” Davies said. At the Earthling, Fernando is waiting on Gertrude Stein.

Mike Lynch, co-owner of Premier Sports Cards in Ventura, called to report that business soared immediately after Magic Johnson announced his retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers on Nov. 7. And things have been hectic since.

“The same day it happened, probably 3 or 4 in the afternoon, we got phone calls,” he said. (Johnson held the official news conference about 3:30 p.m.) “When the first person walked in, we had Magic (his rookie card) for $250 and she almost bought it. We moved it to $350 when she walked out.”

Lynch said he bought 200 of Johnson’s second-year Topps Co. cards Nov. 9 and, within two days, had sold 160 of them. “I’ve never seen anything like this at all,” he said. “A guy called and asked, ‘Do you have a Magic rookie?’ We said yes, and he got here in probably 20 minutes, from Malibu.”

A look at the announcement for the Palm Street Gallery gathering Saturday tells it all. “It’s black, gray, very somber,” owner Lorence Burdorf said. “It’s the ‘who died?’ look.”

The who is actually the gallery itself--at least for now. Thanks to the economic situation, Burdorf said, it’s just not profitable to operate the business. Burdorf said he’s basically running the venue on profits from his plant-leasing business, the Original Plant People.

“There’s a lot of dismay, frustration. A lot of people had their hopes up because they saw the gallery community thriving,” he said. “It appears as though the market is alive and vital because we’ve been putting money out of the other business into this thing.”

Burdorf said the number of art pieces being sold has stayed about the same over the past couple of years, but the pieces being sold now are much smaller. “We were selling $1,500 pieces a couple of years ago. Now we’re selling $300 pieces.”

Palm Street Gallery has been at its 34 N. Palm St. location for almost 1 1/2 years. For the two years prior to that, Burdorf owned the Hollywood Beach Triangle Gallery.

The gallery is officially scheduled to close Dec. 1. Burdorf said he might reopen it down the road, depending on the local cultural economy, which itself may depend on the progress of Ventura’s new cultural arts plan.

And how does his exit affect the city’s present cultural situation? “It’s losing a venue and that in itself does have an effect,” Burdorf said. “That’s one of the things that’s most missing in Ventura.”