New Chapter Begins for Bookseller

One morning last November, Diane Neveu sat in a meeting plotting out some promotional Christmas froufrou with a few other downtown Ventura business people.

In a little while, Neveu (pronounced Nev-you) would be plotting out the rest of her life.

“The first firetruck went by,” she recalled, “and I said, ‘Boy, I hate to see that. It makes me nervous.’ ”

Within five minutes, her frantic employee reached her: A kitchen fire at the Mexican restaurant next door had gotten out of hand and smoke was pouring through her Main Street store.

The Book Mall of Ventura--a comfortable warren of first editions, vintage children’s books, interesting historical volumes and literary oddities beyond number--would be a collection of cinders within minutes.

Last week, Neveu reopened in a bigger space a few blocks away at Santa Clara and Oak. After an elaborate Chinese blessing, a band called the Ever Growing Tomato provided music it called “folk-fusion.” More than 100 of the old store’s loyal customers ambled amid volumes of quaint and curious forgotten lore. Days later, purple petals still littered the floor, the remains of a bouquet.

“Ah, the smell of a bookstore,” Neveu said as she thumbed through Punch magazines from 1934 that filled a milk crate. “I can’t think of anything better, even the smell of water on grass.”

We both inhaled. I sensed the aroma of compound phrases lovingly aged in leather--dry, and more full-bodied than anything you might sniff at Barnes & Noble or Borders.

The Book Mall is nearly 10 years old. It has been part of a shrinking collection of half a dozen stores, give or take, where you could browse through ancient dictionaries, framed Lucky Strike ads, World War I recruitment posters, Civil War etchings, dead magazines of the 1920s and children’s books from a day when children had a more easily engaged sense of wonder: “The Radio Boys Visit Panama!”

With a couple of stores folding, the Book Mall’s comeback is all the more poignant.

Many of the people who helped Neveu save the store had never been inside it. But as water from firefighters’ hoses rained down on the books and flames leaped from the Michael Kelley beauty salon on the floor above, the kindness of strangers flowered.

“People just walking by rushed in and helped us move stacks of books into the parking lot,” Neveu said. “A few surfers who came up from Surfers Point helped us with the bookcases. Later on, Jim Monahan, the city councilman, came by and offered to take the books to a storage space he had on the Avenue. It was amazing and touching.”

When the smoke cleared, Neveu had lost nearly 2,000 volumes--perhaps 10% of her stock. Many were works of fiction and children’s books, but Neveu doesn’t want to know the lost titles.

“I couldn’t even look at the list,” she said.

For months, she has attended to a business that didn’t exist. She has been arguing with the insurance company, negotiating a lease, hiring contractors, planning the big move. “I’m a bookseller,” she sighed, “not an accountant.”

She has lived in the shadow of stress; this woman who loves books hasn’t yet finished the Patricia Cornwell crime novel she started three months ago.

At the same time, she bought 50 more crates of books from an estate sale in Glendale and piled them in her living room.

“They’re turn-of-the-century, they’re wonderful, they’re just beautiful books,” she said.

A block off Main Street, the new store sits across from a pawn shop and down the street from the Salvation Army. Neveu hopes she can draw business with a coffee cart out front, as well as occasional book signings, poetry readings and other events.

Inside, the back room is swimming nearly ceiling-high with cardboard boxes yet uncounted and unpacked. They’re all marked: Chinese history, archeology, astronomy. Many bear hieroglyphics that would have made sense only in the old store: “Bookshelf 8, Shelf C, Sec. 3.” Neveu has no idea what’s inside them and figures it might be a month before they make their way to the airy room up front.

Still, there’s enough on display for any dedicated browser.

There are shelves of Shaw, Conrad, Proust and a special edition of “Death of a Salesman” signed by Arthur Miller. There are old-fashioned adventures: “Three Vagabonds in Friesland.” “The Yarn of a Yankee Privateer.”

There are encyclopedias compiled a century before CD-ROMs and historical what-nots, like Capt. John F. Merry’s two-volume, leather-bound “History of Delaware County, Iowa.”

“The men and women who opened the state of Iowa and the county of Delaware had nothing but the red man to dispute their coming and obstruct their progress,” Merry wrote in 1914. “In that regard, something should be recorded in these pages. . . . “

Then there’s this enticing query from Harriet Beecher Stowe in “The Minister’s Wedding”: “Will our little Mary really fall in love with the Doctor? The question reaches us in anxious tones from all the circle of our readers . . . “

I asked Neveu what she would be doing if she hadn’t reopened. She looked at me as if I had suggested we set a shipload of orphans adrift in the Pacific.

“I couldn’t do that,” she said. “I couldn’t leave them in the cartons.”

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.