A Great Place to Read in a 24-Hour Town

Hanging out at World Book and News in Hollywood, one thing becomes clear rather quickly: People are what they read.

A hip couple--she in a beret and red lipstick, he in a black jacket and close-cropped blond hair--peruse European fashion magazines. Two dudes with two-toned hair and torn jeans rip through the newsstand’s surfer mags. (“Look at that pipe, man! Perfect!”) A young blond woman wearing no-nonsense glasses and rolled-up jeans with a book bag slung across her torso plants herself in the art and architecture section.

In the midst of a “Blade Runner”-esque Hollywood, 24-hour World Book and News is an oasis of literary intensity at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood boulevards. Eyes scan the shelves, heads bow in concentration, fingers flip through glossy magazine pages. Few words are exchanged.

The volume is staggering: Thousands of magazines for connoisseurs of tattoos, home design and UFO sightings, hundreds of domestic and foreign newspapers, aisles of books. The stand takes up half a city block, with one long rack outside and a small enclosed shop.

The monastic calm is periodically shattered; this is Hollywood, after all. Muscle cars cruise up Cahuenga, as loud as jets, spilling frenzied rave music into the night. Across the street there’s a shouting match. Customers turn for a moment to see what’s happening and then go back to their reading.

“Yeah, you see just about everything here,” says Hershel (Hershey) Weisman, who probably has seen just about everything since he started full time in the family business about four years ago. His father, Bernie, bought the place in 1975 and then, two years ago, turned over the day-to-day operations to Hershey and his uncle, Mark Rose. Most mornings, Weisman is at the newsstand greeting regulars and selling papers.

His appearance on this Saturday night is unusual.

“When the bars close around 2 a.m. you get guys who come here to try to pick up some of the girls, and sometimes they find out they’re not girls. I could stand here for hours and watch people.”

Wearing a World Book and News sweat shirt and baseball cap, Weisman chats with customers and his high school friend John Cogan, who’s filling out comic book orders.

Signs announce “No more Superman.”

“We completely sold out,” Weisman says of the much-hyped issue in which the superhero buys the farm. “We could have sold twice the number we did. We even took prepaid orders for them, and we never do that.”

Out-of-town papers are selling well these days, too, but the demand isn’t from lonely transplants.

“People really want to get out of L.A., and they’ll come and pick up three, four out-of-town papers and look through the want ads,” Weisman says.

Mayoral wanna-be Michael Woo strolls past the newsstand and nods to Weisman. An elegant, older woman in a red coat breaks from the line waiting to get into the Catalina Bar & Grill and asks, “How late are you open?”

“All night,” Weisman says.

“So when we come out we’ll be able to come by?” she says hesitantly, not quite confident about this 24-hour concept.

“Yep.”

A man squats down, opens a magazine to a picture of the late attorney Roy Cohn and asks his friend, “Is he still alive?”

“No, he died of AIDS.”

“ Really ? When?”

“Recently.”

“ Really ? Wow.”

It’s cold on this night, the kind of cold that radiates from the concrete through the soles of the shoes and into the bones. Some take refuge by the indoor racks.

A ragged sign that reads “5 Min. Browsing,” is posted above the racks of skin mags, straight and gay, but no one seems to pay any attention to the warning. Time stands still for those gazing at greased-up, surgically enhanced bodies. And no one seems to get chased out after the five-minute limit is up anyway.

“That’s the ‘sophisticate aisle,’ ” Weisman says, laughing. “My dad came up with that one, and so that’s what we call it.”

Two nights later, Ella Fitzgerald scats out of a speaker. Patrons stifle yawns as they pick up copies of Harper’s Bazaar, Newsweek, People, Swank.

“It’s the best jazz,” says Joey Nunez, who started at the newsstand in 1978, making him the employee with the longest tenure.

“Me and some buddies lived in San Antonio and decided to come out and try acting,” he says, swigging from a carton of chocolate milk. “But after a couple of weeks we had to get jobs, and I stopped by here and Bernie hired me. I’ve been here ever since, except for a few months I took off. I went back to San Antonio, but I missed the city life, you know, the excitement.”

A woman wearing a watch cap, a jacket and flimsy leggings panhandles for change; occasionally someone gives her a dollar. After a few minutes a man carrying a pizza hands her a slice on a paper plate. She says a quick “Thank you” and saunters down Cahuenga.

A man with a long, thick ponytail, his head plugged into earphones, looks through Mirabella and Glamour. The “sophisticate aisle” is crowded with a broad cross-section of males way past their five-minute limit.

In front of the music section a 30-ish man conservatively dressed in a suit and tie cruises past Axgrinder and Vibe, wavers around Metal Edge and settles on Rolling Stone.

One young mild-mannered man in jeans and a work shirt violates the “people are what they read” rule. Reaching to a shelf he quickly picks off current issues of Fighting Knives, Knives Illustrated and Blade magazines (“Engraved Blades Are Back!”) and brings them to the cash register.

“This is a great place to work,” says Joey. “And people say this isn’t a 24-hour town. Hah.”

Hah, indeed. Who can sleep with all that reading going on?