Fahrenheit 451 Burned by Money Woes : Bookstore: Laguna group seeks to help keep it afloat. Its owners say an embezzlement is to blame.

From its humble beginnings as a cozily cluttered counterculture bookstore in the ‘60s to its more yuppified reincarnation in the ‘90s, Fahrenheit 451 has been as much a part of Laguna Beach as art galleries and volleyball.

But after 26 years as Orange County’s best-known literary oasis--a place where beat poet Allen Ginsberg and former Yippie leader Jerry Rubin once held court--the landmark bookstore named after Ray Bradbury’s science fiction novel about censorship is about to close because of financial problems.

The end could come today or it could come Sunday--owner Dotti Ibsen is not sure.

“It depends on if there’s any books left and if we can make enough money selling coffee and dessert,” said Ibsen, who has been running a 50% liquidation sale since last weekend.

Ibsen says the bookstore’s problems are due to an embezzlement, which the Laguna Beach Police Department confirms it is investigating. News of Fahrenheit’s financial woes has spread faster than last October’s wildfires.

“There is a grass-roots group that has sort of bubbled up that’s very heartening,” Ibsen said.

The group of about 100, which calls itself the Friends of Fahrenheit, is planning a benefit next weekend and hopes to attract investors to keep Fahrenheit afloat.

“It’s probably the only place on the (Orange County) coast that a person can go and actually get a taste of the ‘60s and the Haight-Ashbury days and the coffeehouse and the metaphysics and the artists and the whole bit,” said Ron Watson, a syndicated radio talk show host who lives in Dana Point and has been a Fahrenheit aficionado for 10 years.

Ibsen, who says customers continue to express disbelief that a store that seems so successful could be closing, reported to police that the alleged embezzlement caused Fahrenheit to lose about $100,000 over a 17-month period. Police declined to give any other details.

After falling behind on $23,000 in rent, she and her husband, Ken, recently lost their lease on the store. With diminished cash flow in recent months, she said, they were unable to pay for restocking their shelves and their main book distributors stopped supplying them. And when that happens, Ibsen said, “you’re not in the book business anymore.”

The Ibsens had planned to move Fahrenheit 451 from its address on South Coast Highway into a much larger store on Forest Avenue by this month. A prime location only three storefronts from Main Beach, the new store would have been what Ibsen terms a combination bookstore, restaurant and arts forum.

Now, “we’re trying really hard to put together some kind of an investment package so that we could actually sell half (the interest in) the store and be able to continue on at our new location on Forest Avenue,” said Ibsen, 55.

Despite facing imminent closure with no investors in sight, Ibsen nevertheless remains hopeful that Fahrenheit 451 will rise from the ashes.

“With so many people wanting it to happen,” she said, “I can’t see how it can’t help but happen.”

Bill Tannebring, whose jazz trio plays at Fahrenheit every Monday night and who will play at the benefit, is one of those people.

“One of the things that has made this such an interesting place is it really seems to reflect Laguna’s ambience. It’s an eclectic mix of people, not only in terms of their intellectual and cultural pursuits, but families, kids and students come here,” he said.

Fahrenheit is a place where customers can listen to a jazz group one night and a Brazilian folk singer the next night, he said. It’s a place where they can hear poetry readings and get books autographed by their authors. It’s a place where a patron can be found playing chess in one corner and a psychic or numerologist will be chatting with customers in another corner.

And, he said, it’s the kind of bookstore where a customer can order a cappuccino, pick up a book “and treat the place like a library. There is nobody there to discourage that kind of activity. Dotti is an unusual woman. She loves the bookstore and the atmosphere and the community.”

The Ibsens--she’s a former mechanical engineer, and he’s a professor emeritus of biochemistry at UC Irvine Medical School--bought Fahrenheit 451 in 1988 when it was still situated near the Hotel Laguna on the beach side of South Coast Highway.

The shop had a tradition of providing a warm, friendly atmosphere and an eclectic inventory not found in chain stores--from books by small publishers and obscure poets to magazines on alternative medicine and vegetarian food. When British mystery writer P.D. James dropped in during the mid-’80s, she called it “my idea of a perfect bookstore.”

The Ibsens continued the store’s traditions when they moved Fahrenheit into more spacious quarters in a mini-mall across the street in 1991. (Ray Bradbury himself attended the grand opening, calling the store with a dozen tables on a tiled patio outside “a reader’s paradise.”)

In making the move, the Ibsens doubled the store’s book inventory, added a cappuccino bar that serves gourmet pastries and computerized the operation.

Ironically for a bookstore named after the temperature at which paper burns, Fahrenheit’s financial problems came to light in the wake of the Laguna Beach fire last fall.

Ibsen said that business had fluctuated from month to month, but because of the recession she and her husband did not suspect anything.

But after closing during the fire, they began “to get involved in the finances more than we usually would have,” she said. “We were preparing a disaster loan application. In doing that, a lot of things came painfully to light.”

Without the alleged embezzlement, which Ibsen reported began in July, 1992, and continued through last November, “we were holding our own.”

Indeed, a year ago the Ibsens had begun planning for the move to the new location at 225 Forest Ave., the former home of Marriner’s Stationers Booksellers & Furniture.

The vacant new store boasts vaulted skylights, small balconies and two mezzanines that overlook the performance and restaurant area. With lighting “that looks like a stellar constellation,” Ibsen said, “the place is absolutely exquisite. Nobody has ever seen any bookstore like this in the whole world. It feels like an opera house.”

Ibsen said the carpets are already in. They have picked out used kitchen equipment and would only need to have the bookshelves made and order the books. “All it takes is just funding and then we’ll do it,” she said.

The vacant new store will be the site of the upcoming benefit open house on April 9 and 10. The open house--to run from noon to midnight both days--will include food, music ranging from jazz to opera, psychic readings, mimes, and displays of local artists’ works. Any money raised will go first toward paying the store’s 14 employees, Ibsen said.

As a sign of what Fahrenheit 451 means to Laguna residents, those involved in the open house are donating their services.

Watson, who is helping rally Friends of Fahrenheit, said that when he asked the owner of the Greek restaurant near the bookstore if he would help donate food, he said, “Whatever it takes, I’ll be there.”

“The whole community is just trying to get behind this,” he said. “There’s a great amount of love for the bookstore. It’s just a sad thing that’s happening.”

Watson, like other every other longtime customer, cannot picture Laguna Beach without Fahrenheit 451.

To see it disappear from Laguna, he said, would be no less than the loss “of some of its soul.”

Lore and the Lure

* How it all began: Dennis Madison and his wife, Lynn Chevli, opened Fahrenheit 451 at 509 S. Coast Highway in 1968. The counterculture bookstore was a magnet for the hippies of the day.

* Owners arrested: Police arrested Gordon and Evelyn Wilson, who owned the store from 1972 to 1976, in 1973 for selling allegedly obscene underground comic books. The offending publications? Zap and Greaser. Charges were dropped two years later and the case was dismissed.

* Anything goes: In 1978, a performance artist sat in the store window and typed what he was hearing when people walked by.

* Ginsberg speaks: In 1985, Playboy Video paid Lorraine Zimmerman, the store’s third owner, to close the shop on a Sunday to tape an interview with beat poet Allen Ginsberg, in town for the Laguna Poetry Festival. “He actually sat and talked--about everything--for six hours and didn’t even ask for a glass of water,” Zimmerman says.

* Wet mishap: In 1987, the washing machine in the apartment above overran and water dripped down into the store. Recalls Zimmerman: “It dripped over history, philosophy, nature, science. . . .”

Researched by DENNIS McLELLAN / Los Angeles Times