Closing the Bookstore

As though strolling the boulevards of Versailles, Joseph Plauzoles would take his early morning promenade around Rancho Park in West Los Angeles. As the 89-year-old Frenchman turned the corner onto Westwood Boulevard, he delighted in the approaching view: his bookstore.

Plauzoles passed away several years ago, said his son Lucien, thankful that his father isn’t here to see La Cite, the city’s only French bookstore, about to go out of business after 52 years.

Now, the wooden shelves are mostly bare, magazine stands are empty and a box overflows with Eiffel Tower pencil sharpeners slashed to $1.98. Lucien has worked 69 straight days, archiving, packing and frantically trying to find a place for all the unsold books that will be homeless after Wednesday.

Although Lucien Plauzoles is sorry to see his father’s dream of keeping alive a bit of French culture come to an end, “It served its purpose,” he said Saturday. “It’s gone its course.”

So far, Plauzoles has been able to keep his emotions at bay by staying busy. He hasn’t thought about what he’s going to do next or how he will feel after the doors shut for good. He’s 54, and the business has spanned his entire life.

“I’m married to it,” he said. “Though my wife argues that it’s more like a mistress.”

For Plauzoles, his father and the city’s French community, the bookstore was a “little bit of home,” said one rueful patron, who has depended on the store for decades.

A remnant of what it once was, the bookstore has walls lined with tall cases that used to spill over with thousands of books. Hardback editions of French comics like Asterix and Tintin now barely fill the wooden stands. Posters of 1970s movies, gallery announcements and even a print of the Michelin man riding over glass still line the ceiling. Against one musty corner is the cash register, where a French-speaking employee stood ready.

“I only found out they were closing when I saw the signs on the window,” said Tony Weiss, who moved to Los Angeles from Paris five years ago. “It’s like France in there. It’s like family. A place like Borders . . . it’s a factory.”

Erik Laykin has been coming to the bookstore for 10 years to buy film and tour guides that he couldn’t find anywhere else.

“It’s the only bookstore where you can find all of this on a daily basis,” he said.

Other customers remember coming to the bookstore to buy obscure literature, rare books of poetry or French newspapers.

They have only two days left to return to the bookstore they love. It will be open from 1 to 6 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then the bookstore will close without fanfare.

The elder Plauzoles and his wife immigrated to Los Angeles in 1946. For more than a decade, an aunt living in Los Angeles had regaled them with stories of the city and invited the couple to live in one of her homes. After bombings, missed meals and other hardships of World War II, it sounded good. They waited two months just outside Paris for their passports.

When the couple arrived, they found that the elderly aunt had grown confused. She thought Plauzoles was the gardener and his wife, the cook, though the aunt had neither. Undeterred, Plauzoles began working in a Popsicle factory, and he eventually started thinking about importing books.

America was a different place back then, the younger Plauzoles said. Embracing cultural differences was unheard of, and immigrants often gave up their identity just to assimilate, he said. Hardly anything written in French was available in Los Angeles. By importing books, Joseph Plauzoles hoped he could remind his fellow Frenchmen of who they were and offer future generations a cultural resource.

“My father saw his work less in numbers and more as a cultural mission,” Lucien Plauzoles said.

For the first 17 years, the business operated out of the Plauzoles’ home and in a bungalow behind their garage. Plauzoles rushed to get his American citizenship, a requirement to import and sell books to libraries. He spent his days packing two suitcases full of books and riding a streetcar to sell them at USC and a county library. Lucien Plauzoles still remembers helping his father pack the cases when he was 14.

In 1965, Joseph Plauzoles opened his bookstore at 2306 Westwood Blvd. He got the name after a friend, upon seeing the 16,000 titles stacked to the ceiling, exclaimed that it looked like a city of books. The elder Plauzoles filled the shop with historical texts, paperbacks, magazines, comics, leather-bound classics and children’s books. He even imported delicate clay figurines from Provence.

“It was a dream for my dad . . . both the store and having a son to take over,” said Lucien, who has no children of his own.

The 1970s were good years for privately owned bookstores in West Los Angeles. Within a two-mile radius, there were 13. Now, with La Cite closing, the only one left is a nearby technical book store.

La Cite flourished until the 1990s. Eventually, however, the shop began to suffer tremendous losses while rent continued to climb. By this time, Plauzoles said, much of the French community had fully integrated into American culture.

Losses last year convinced Plauzoles that it was time to close the business.

“My biggest failure was not being able to communicate to the French community the necessity of patronizing this store to keep it open,” he said. “They come from a highly socialized society and think if something is worthwhile, the state will save it.”

As he stared at a handwritten list of the 80 employees who worked at the store over its lifetime, his eyes softened. To him, it’s the bookstore’s entire history.

There was the Japanese kid who spoke half a dozen languages, the Armenian who learned French at a transcendental meditation center and the doctor who worked there part time to keep up his language skills. Lucien plans to tape the list along with a thank-you note on the shop’s front window.