She’s made a career of spreading the word

During nearly four decades in the book business, Wendy Werris has shadowed her share of celebrities. She sold books in Hollywood to Mick Jagger, Joni Mitchell, Anais Nin and Tom Brokaw. She worked as a publisher in the Bay Area with Annie Leibovitz, Jann Wenner and Hunter S. Thompson. She’s been an author’s escort, ferrying Jonathan Franzen, Joe Eszterhas, Maxine Hong Kingston and other writers around Los Angeles as part of their book tours.

It’s been a life in the background, a career in the wings. But now Werris is stepping into the spotlight as author of “An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books,” an engaging memoir of her experiences in the Southland’s vast book market. And the cheers she got during a recent appearance at the Southern California Booksellers Assn. meeting in Los Angeles were not just for her years in the trenches. Werris’ book is the first to give an L.A. view of the era when large chains began eclipsing independent stores, changing the book world forever.

It is an unabashed love letter to literary Los Angeles.

“I’m a person who always had a passion for books -- the way they look and feel, the way they smell on the printed page,” she said. “If you told me 40 years ago that this would become the center of my life, I’d have been astonished. But it’s part of my DNA now. It’s who I am.”

Werris tells the story of a kid who got her start at the legendary Pickwick Bookshop in Hollywood. She went on to become a local publishers’ representative, one of the unheralded salespeople who travel to stores across the nation for months at a time, persuading booksellers to order new titles pouring out of New York houses. Werris celebrates the heady days when she helped boost the careers of promising, unknown writers. She writes humorously of her boozy one-night stand with counterculture poet Richard Brautigan. She feels helpless anger when her father, Snag Werris, once a TV writer for Jackie Gleason, can no longer find work. In the most devastating segment, she describes the trauma of her 1981 rape in Los Angeles and her long journey toward healing.

“So what’s your book about?” a young publicist at the SCBA banquet asked brightly, as Werris, 56, sat down to dine on a recent Saturday at the Biltmore Hotel. “How would you describe it?” The author seemed momentarily stumped. She had spent years persuading book merchants to buy books by others, on the strength of a snappy sales pitch. But how do you condense your own life into a pitch?

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Back to Pickwick days

Once there was a mecca for Los Angeles literati called the Pickwick Bookshop. A three-story building with an ornate facade, it stood on Hollywood Boulevard near Highland Avenue and was the largest independent bookstore west of the Mississippi. During its prime years, from the 1940s through the early 1970s, Pickwick’s $3-million annual revenues would be the equivalent of $18 million to $19 million today, similar to a large Barnes & Noble superstore.

Louis Epstein, who founded the shop in 1938, drilled his staff in one basic lesson: “Never give anyone a discount!” he would say. “I don’t even give my rabbi a discount!”

But as Werris learned the ins and outs of bookselling in 1970, Pickwick’s genteel pace was giving way to a more corporate rhythm. Two years later, on the day she left to work at another store, the B. Dalton chain, which had purchased Pickwick, was installing computerized cash registers that made it easier to track books that had been sold.

“This is where the depersonalization started,” Werris said during an interview in her Hancock Park-area apartment. “The book world had been a culture. Now it was becoming a business.”

As she moved from job to job, Werris’ odyssey took her to stores that were part of the region’s cultural history and are long gone: Papa Bach in Santa Monica, Hunters in Beverly Hills, Campbell’s Books in Westwood. A watershed moment came in the early 1980s, when the first Crown Books began appearing in strip malls and other sites through the region.

“They were popping up like pods all over Southern California,” she recalled. “And the key was that they offered deep discounts that most independent bookstores could never match. Those stores that refused to cut prices began disappearing. Those that did managed to hold on.”

Werris landed her first job as a publisher’s representative in 1976 for a small East Coast house. Over the next three decades she would do such work for 70 publishers, alerting buyers to new titles and informing publishers of changing tastes at the grass roots. Werris was one of the first women to take on such a job.

But the book world was changing profoundly as chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders began appearing. They offered even deeper discounts than Crown, had a larger stock and soon forced many independents to close.

That, in turn, left fewer places for sales reps to ply their wares. Werris and her colleagues felt the chill.

Werris’ own ties to the industry were severed this summer, when a new management team at Oxford University Press let her go, after 20 years.

It was not an amicable parting.

Now that “An Alphabetical Life” is in stores, she’s getting used to her new role. After a lifetime of selling other people’s words, it’s a challenge to seek an audience for her own.

“That’s my life on the printed page,” she said proudly. “You’ll either buy it or you won’t.”

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josh.getlin@latimes.com