Turning over an old leaf

Located on one of Glendale’s most lively blocks, Brand Books is a spacious used bookstore with a dusty and cluttered charm. Trying to walk past the giant window display is no easy task, what with books sporting such titles as “Marked Cards and Loaded Dice: How to Detect Crooked Gambling,” “The Instant Juggling Book,” “Great Military Blunders” and “The History of Prostitution,” begging you to drop in and browse.

Inside are owner Jerome Joseph and manager Noriyaki Nakano, a friendly, slightly wacky duo who seem to strike up conversations with nearly every customer. Joseph has owned the place for 17 years, expanding it twice, and has packed 100,000 books into the store. He has an excellent selection of foreign literature with shelves dedicated to African, Russian, Indian, Czech and Caribbean writers. There are books about the California Gold Rush, a section on ghost towns, a massive collection of old cookbooks with one shelf given over to chocolate, and a whole bookcase dedicated to cats.

As is the case with most used bookstores in L.A., Brand Books has seen dwindling sales. The used-book business has never been a booming one; owners cite everything from the recession to war to Internet sales to the giant chains as reasons. But the news isn’t all bleak.

The latest consumer book-purchase study shows that, nationally, used bookstores have increased their market share from 3% to 5% in recent years. The increasing retail prices for hardcover and paperbacks have encouraged consumers to seek out used books for better savings, according to the Book Industry Study Group. Some used-book sellers have found a way to make the Internet work for them, and most have garnered strong customer loyalty.

On a recent Saturday afternoon at Brand, several customers say they’ve been shopping there since it opened. “I’m particularly interested in art books,” says a woman who would only give her first name, Sylvia, who drops in at least once a week, “and I like Jerome and his personality. I have bought many books here and I like that you can bring books back and resell them. I like the layout of the whole store. It’s very comfortable to me.”

Another store, described by its customers as cozy and warm, is the Iliad in North Hollywood, which has all the used-bookstore staples. There’s a cat curled up on the counter, gentle classical music playing over the speakers, dust that seizes the attention of one’s sinuses and books on the floor in stacks.

Specializing in literature and the arts, the Iliad has a lot of fine, high-quality books that are exceptionally well organized. There’s a table stacked with books that are $2 and less, where one might be able to grab Jean Genet’s “The Thief’s Journal,” “The Marx-Engels Reader,” a hardback copy of Tom Wolfe’s mammoth “A Man in Full” or any number of books by Camille Paglia.

A table of $3 to $10 books is nearby and there’s a free-book bin with works by Carl Sagan and Leon Uris. A bookcase of erotic nonfiction, art and sex manuals is next to one with shelves devoted to marijuana, psychedelics, alcohol and tobacco. Unlike many used bookstores, the Iliad is well lighted with three big couches and a coffee table. It’s fairly crowded on a Monday afternoon and it’s obvious that this is a store that has sacrificed some book space for customer comfort.

“This place has a good atmosphere with the couches and the cat,” 18-year-old Amanda Valencia says. “You can normally find a lot of books that you wouldn’t be able to find at new bookstores like Barnes & Noble. Some of the books just have more personality when you buy them used. They have things underlined.... If you’re looking for a particular fiction book by an author that’s not really popular, you might have a better chance in an independent or used bookstore.”

The Iliad has also managed to turn a profit from the Internet, which most used booksellers consider their foremost enemy. Opened 16 years ago by Dan Weinstein, the Iliad’s business has improved almost every year.

“We sell a lot of books to big chains through the mail order,” says Weinstein, who comes from a family of used-bookstore owners, which includes his father and five uncles, along with a brother who’s a bookbinder. “When they get an order for a used book, they just filter it to one of their used-bookstore connections. If you go to Amazon, they give you the option of buying a used copy. What they do is search a database that we subscribe to, so they’ve turned into one of our bigger clients.”

Another massive shop, Cliff’s Books in Pasadena is packed to the gills, undusted and disorderly. In many ways it epitomizes the used bookstore of old. A lot of fancy books are displayed behind glass and there are eight paper signs warning customers not to lean on or touch the glass. Cliff’s sells comics, old records, videos, magazines, vintage postcards and Bettie Page Zippo lighters. There are five bookcases filled with unpriced, vintage paperbacks and customers can rummage through them until closing time at midnight. For 17 years, Cliff Gildart has owned the store, but he’s never been more worried about staying afloat.

“It started to go bad around the time the number of computers in the U.S. doubled,” Gildart says, “about 4 1/2 years ago. Patronage dropped off so drastically that it was almost impossible to believe, like 75%. I tried to sell books online, but ... it’s not free to put them on and it was a lot of labor to describe books and type them in. It was just another albatross around my neck.”

Samantha Scully bought the West L.A. neighborhood institution, Gene de Chene Booksellers, last year from Gene de Chene, who is 82 and owned the store for 35 years. She’s been managing the cramped, fluorescent-lit store for seven years and business is OK, she says. Scully’s left-wing political leanings are evident in the store’s antiwar window display, the availability of titles such as “Sabotage in the American Workplace” and occasional poetry events and teach-ins about the war and 1st Amendment issues.

Like many used-bookstore owners, Scully has mixed feelings about the popularity of chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders.

“In a sense, the chains made going to a bookstore on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon to just hang out more of a popular thing to do as entertainment,” she says. “I think some of that comes back to us and some of that community realizes that they can’t get certain things there and they have to pay double what they pay here. The Internet probably hurts us more because out-of-print books can be purchased online quickly without rummaging through shelves.”

In an impressive, nearly 100-year-old residential space with two giant pillars at its door, the Bookhouse in South Pasadena has a dining room, living room, bedrooms, kitchen and a closet all filled with books and smartly arranged with antiques and art.

Manager Cay Sehnert opened the store with his former girlfriend Mary Lafleur in 1994, but they broke up a year and a half later. She’s still the owner, while Sehnert runs the shop and lives in an apartment in the same complex.

“If you go to a new bookstore, you often feel that you’re getting the corporate push, that they’re marketing what they want to market at you,” says Bookhouse regular Karl Ruiter, who comes in as often as twice a week. “But somehow, Cay keeps his stock really fresh. I read a lot and so, even in the library, I’ll get to feeling that I’ve exhausted an entire topic. But at the Bookhouse you can always go to a section that you’ve been through a hundred times and find something new.”

Although corporate chains have given much of their space to coffee and socializing, most used bookstores can’t afford to do that or don’t want to sacrifice their aviation and Civil War sections. Rather, these spots are about finding forgotten books by obscure authors, travel books to places that no longer exist and handsome volumes with exquisite covers. Their patrons search and sometimes find what they’re looking for, and sometimes walk away with an unexpected discovery.