One ‘Little Fish’ Who Won’t Abandon the Pond

My grandfather, who turned artist in his latter years, once depicted the grim nature of nature as a small fish swimming resolutely forward as a larger fish is about to engulf him, even as the larger fish is casting a fearful eye back at a still larger fish about to gobble him, and he in turn is looking backward at a vaster fish ready to . . . . The rest you know, if not from watching nature films then from reading the business pages.

What with vertical integration, takeovers and buyouts, corporate America is getting less diverse as the nation at large is getting more so. At this rate, I like to say, there will eventually be one company in the entire nation, and it will be named McDisneySoft.

Even in the book trade, Barnes & Noble, the biggest bookseller, is buying Ingram, the biggest book wholesaler. That sent the other big book boys straight to the Justice Department to ask just what kind of sweetheart monopoly deal this was. But they may have to wait their turn behind the people who are miffed at Microsoft, whose dealings belie the fact that it is named for the two qualities no aggressive and successful man wants to be identified with.

Anyway, back to the smallest fish. In this case, his name is Doug Dutton. He and his brother Dave run four elegant independent bookshops that swim in the waters of commerce with schools of mega-mackerel such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.

They have fellow fishlets around town (Skylight Books, Midnight Special Books, Book Soup), but many others (Dodd’s in Long Beach, Earthling Bookshop in Santa Barbara) have already been overtaken and eaten. Still, the Duttonfish manages to outswim and outthink the big ichthyoids, and if you don’t know what that means, go look it up in your Funk & Wagnalls.

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The dutton kids’ father was a businessman who spent vacations dragging them into bookstores before it occurred to him that he could open one of his own and stay home, and so he did, in North Hollywood in 1961, in that Paleozoic Age before discounters, monster stores and the malling of America.

No use pretending that such stores haven’t hurt the independents. But where you buy a book is another kind of shopping from where you buy a pair of socks, for it speaks to the quandaries we puzzle over in our lives: quality or quantity, full-service or find-it-yourself, more versus better, hurry versus leisure.

More than his stock of 120,000 meticulously chosen titles, “my biggest capital,” Dutton says, “is that every [employee] knows books and likes books and wants to work in a bookstore, not because they’re waiting for the next job at Blockbuster to open up.” You can play “Name That Tome,” forgetting the title and the author and summoning only a few facts about the book, and the odds are that the clerk at such an independent bookstore will know it.

Bookstores, like restaurants, give character to a neighborhood; is it just one more McDonald’s for the mind, or something more distinct? Dutton’s Brentwood store downplayed the barrage of O.J. Simpson books, and his neighborhood, his customers, were most grateful. When one employee, a Marcel Duchamp fan, ordered 10 copies of a new $250 printing of Duchamp’s writing (a big investment for a little store), he put a handmade sign in the window, and in a few days they were all gone and on back-order.

Some customers think globally and act locally; Dutton sees them come in with something downloaded from Amazon.com. They check out the real book and they buy it. And sometimes they thumb through something, put it down and go home to buy it cheaper on the Internet. But the Internet still hasn’t mastered that tactile serendipity of book-grazing, finding the one you came in for but spotting something else really interesting, and, oh, what’s that one about, and you leave with three books, not one.

Dutton took four new works to some event, to read a bit from each “to explain why I have to stay in the book business,” and when he had finished, “a woman grabbed them and insisted on buying all four, just on the strength of one paragraph. To me, that’s the magic.”

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Somehow, dutton sweet-talked his 15-year-old son into seeing a film where nothing blew up and nobody got blown away, “The Wings of the Dove.” If nothing else, he figured, the boy could moon over Helena Bonham Carter.

“By the time we got home,” Dutton remembers, “he liked it. The next day he asked me to bring [the book] home. And two weeks later, he’s in the living room reading aloud to me: ‘Hey dad, listen to this!’ ”

The 15-year-old has since gone back to rap and incendiary movies, but it was kind of like dad dragging you into a bookstore on vacation: One of these days, you’ll think back and decide it wasn’t so bad after all.