A city stiffens its spine

Beverly Hills, with its blocks of chic boutiques and furriers, $400 (at least) Jimmy Choo shoes and limos rolling silently down the boulevards, still shows ample evidence of a city where people once strolled and went about their daily errands on foot.

On Canon Drive, for instance, the natty and the upscale coexist peacefully -- there’s Edelweiss Chocolates, a neighborhood fixture for decades, advertising “Caramel apples every day” in its windows. There’s Livingstone’s linen store, which has been selling high thread counts and old-fashioned bed jackets since long before they became symbols of wealth. There’s a pharmacy and a dry cleaner.

Needs met, orders filled. Unless, of course, buying a book was on your to-do list.

Beverly Hills has been without a general interest bookstore for years, since Rizzoli books closed (and before that, Hunter’s Books and Martindales, long a local institution). But that was remedied late last month when Doug Dutton opened the doors of his new bookstore, finally accepting a deal after five years of courtship from the city.

The store, all 8,000 square feet of it on the corner of Canon and Santa Monica Boulevard, is a peaceful open space, with blond-wood shelves that lean inward, making it easier to read the spines. Part of the flooring is from Hollywood Star Lanes, the 40-year-old bowling alley shut down two years ago. The wood, an EBay find, comes complete with pin markers. There is a small space for a cafe and a section up front next to the registers for magazines and cards. DVDs and CDs will also be stocked.

But Dutton is adamant in his desire not to sell book-related tchotchkes. “I feel great,” he says, “that this is a junk-free bookstore.”

It was 20 years ago that he opened Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore, slowly acquiring more space and spreading like a Topanga guesthouse to the store’s current 500,000-volume size. He brought in Lise Friedman and Scott Wannberg, Diane Leslie and Ed Conklin, all of whom still work there.

In those two decades, the store has had no lease, paying month to month for what, with every passing hour, becomes a more toothsome piece of Westside real estate. Dutton’s relationship with his landlord, David N. Barry, has always been good, he says, but he worries about the future of that location and, more important, the people there who have become a sort of family. What if the building’s owners succumb to pressure to develop the space into a more lucrative business?

Independent bookstore owners across the country often refer to the importance of succession -- assuring that the next generation of owners and employees will have a strong foundation to build on. Dutton wanted his next generation to have some security.

“This is a Berkeley commune,” Dutton says of the staff while feverishly setting up the new store just days before its Oct. 24 opening. Nearby, Leslie stops vacuuming shelves for a minute and even Conklin, chief book buyer and Brentwood store manager, comes out to talk. Conklin never comes out to talk, so he must like the new space. Maybe it’s all the blond wood and light.

Eileen Lynch, who has been at Dutton’s for at least 10 years, will manage the new store. Lauri Smith, a longtime buyer from Vroman’s, and Inouk Demers, a French Canadian composer who recently moved to Los Angeles from San Diego, will be ordering the music and the DVDs. The roughly 5,500 CDs will be primarily classical, jazz and world music.

It was an opening that almost didn’t happen. The early negotiations with city officials didn’t go well, Dutton recalls. “There was this sea of Armani suits, all perfectly coiffed,” he says of one meeting. Dutton’s attendees were far more funky, even bringing their spouses along. “We didn’t feel like we belonged in Beverly Hills,” he says.

At the time, the city was offering a second-story space above a gourmet food store. Dutton, a bookish man, yes, but a man who knows what he wants, was not thrilled with the plan. He wanted street-level. For its part, the city, defying all laws of commerce, insisted it wanted an independent bookstore, so it didn’t go on to pursue a Borders or Barnes & Noble. Finally, the two sides came to agree: a street-level storefront with a 10-year lease at $2.25 a square foot per month, almost half of what commercial footage usually goes for in this part of town.

Neighboring businesses have been welcoming, sending exotic bouquets with such notes as “To a Great Addition to Our Neighborhood!”

Local writers Gina Nahai and Denise Hamilton, already comfortable with the new location, float in and out. Steve Lavine, president of CalArts, was the first in the door on opening day. He bought eight books then quickly rushed over to the Brentwood branch to buy some there, so as not to confuse his loyalties.

Being in Beverly Hills won’t change the nature of the books sold there. “We’re trying to be who we are,” says Conklin, who long dreamed of having a University Press section, a dream that has materialized in two large sections up front. The new store also will host a reading series, perhaps two to three presentations a week (Brentwood’s holds four to six a week), but at a certain point, Dutton says, too many readings intrude on the life of the store.

“I like a bookstore that is quiet,” he says. The store has space for 75 chairs and has booked readings well into 2005, including Margot Livesey, Chris Van Allsburg and Nigella Lawson.

Unlike at the chains, which sell spots on the ends of shelving -- called “end caps” -- and particularly visible shelf spots to publishers promoting particular titles, the Dutton’s end caps are not for sale. They will be reserved, he says, for books the employees especially like, or for books by friends and members of the Dutton’s community. That community could keep growing. Dutton is dreaming of a location in the rich and diverse Grand Avenue corridor of downtown L.A.

Until then, on a warm autumn afternoon, the sun bouncing off the sparkling sidewalk, a reader can browse a bit in Beverly Hills and wander over to Caffe Roma, where the governor has been known to light up a cigar on the patio. Somewhere, far away, novelists and poets scribble and mutter, crumple and curse. We can suffer silently in solidarity with them, sipping cappuccinos and flipping through a shiny copy of Derrida’s “The Truth in Painting.”

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Buy-verly Hills

Until just a couple of weeks ago, Beverly Hills had been without a local bookstore for more than a decade. But according to the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce website,

the city does proudly offer the services of:

* 55 full-service restaurants

* 33 jewelers

* 17 caterers

* at least 27 clothing boutiques

* 13 art dealers

* 11 shoe stores

* 9 plastic surgeons

* 4 interior design studios

* At least 1 furrier