I grew up in a cult in New Hampshire where reading books was forbidden. After I escaped at age 18, I came to California desperate for stories — stories tucked away on the West Coast, opposite not only the life I’d escaped but also the publishing giants. In Los Angeles, I found that every story is an apocalypse. There are earthquakes, fires, greed, chaos, cliffsides that slide into the ocean.
By the time I got my feet under me, I was hooked on these narratives. I ferried myself to Dutton’s Books on Laurel Canyon and Vroman’s in Pasadena, and collected authors who altered my way of living: Toni Morrison, Yukio Mishima, Marguerite Duras. I met Carolyn See and read her apocalyptic fantasy “Golden Days,” and dove into Nathanael West’s equally consuming “The Day of the Locust.”
I met locals like Judith Freeman and Harriet Doerr, who taught me how hard it was for women writers to gain recognition in L.A., though I decided not to let that stop me. To me, this was as literary a city as any place on the East Coast, and at the beating heart were the local bookstores that kept on delivering these marvelous writers.
I would argue that bookstores are more important in the sprawl of L.A. than in a walkable city like San Francisco or New York. In those cities, your third place might hover feet from your door: a park, a bar, a pool hall. Outside a handful of centralized communities, this reality isn’t shared in L.A., where you need a vehicle to get almost anywhere. Here, we leap from freeway to work, freeway to home, and parking is often too awful to negotiate stopping anywhere that isn’t worth the hassle.
Bookstores are worth it to Angelenos, a reality that is driven home every time I show up to a packed reading or event at Vroman’s, Chevalier’s, or Skylight. While we’ve heard from New Yorkers that ours isn’t a literary city, and many of the stores I frequented have since been forced to shut their doors, the ones still standing continue to prove otherwise. They remain essential third places, sanctuaries that pull us away from screen-surfing and back into our minds.
A bookstore provides an invitation to pause, to think, to expand your understanding of the world, or to throw yourself into the lurch of new ones: those of elves, princes, creatures, danger, adventure. You can lose an afternoon the way one used to, lying around, tangled in sheets, page by page.
I fell in love with my husband in a bookstore. We haunted Midnight Special in Santa Monica, a since-shuttered shop focused on civil rights and activist literature. The love affair at Midnight Special led us to start Red Hen Press, miniature at first, for voices ignored by the larger houses. I have no doubt other small presses were born from this same branch of our literary world — seeing the work in all its magic, the serendipity of stumbling upon your soul book.
While bookstores everywhere are experiencing a post-pandemic surge in attendance, foot traffic alone isn’t enough to keep them from going under, especially as many readers treat bookshops as reference points — outings to identify books to purchase later on Amazon — rather than as businesses to patronize. Meanwhile, these independent bookshops are those most likely to champion the voices of local, nonprofit and indie publishers — those most in need of amplification.
In an era saturated with bite-size media, these institutions are laying the essential groundwork for a future in which literacy remains a priority. This is especially pressing in a city like L.A., where the film industry takes the first bite. It often seems that book culture crouches like a tiny orphan in the shadow of the cinema giants, and I sometimes feel that the publishing part is a fish lying on the dock. Will we survive? Here, each bookstore and publishing company is a wisp on the wind, but I see us more like water. We flow into everything; we are where the ideas emerge.
Literature has endured for millennia, and it will not die with us. But when we deprive it of spaces to thrive, we reinforce its devaluation as a cultural and artistic force. We’ve seen time and time again what happens when diverse, thought-provoking narratives go missing, and the danger of the stories that can take their place. At a time when icebergs are melting, France is on fire, ICE agents are stomping through the country, domestic abuse is at an all-time high and AI is overriding the mythic act of creation, books that continue to render us human are one of the few things we have to help us maintain our faith in humanity.
The booksellers who prioritize these narratives over the bottom line are too often washed out by mass online marketplaces and high-earning corporate publishers — those who are far less incentivized to uplift narratives from underrepresented authors, those that bridge us back to our communities.
In 2022, Angelenos stepped up and contributed $122,000 to a GoFundMe that helped to keep Octavia’s Bookshelf, a beloved Pasadena bookstore, going. Their survival is meaningful, but when held against the dozens of L.A.-area bookshops that have closed their doors in recent years, we all understand the edge literature is standing on. Readers are purchasing more titles than they did pre-pandemic, though they’re largely securing their books from online retailers. The message is not that people don’t want books; it’s that most people do not understand the impact of buying at a brick-and-mortar location, and how that decision impacts the quality of the books that end up in their hands.
I escaped the cult to find my voice, to find the truth, to amplify meaningful stories. I came to California, the land of reinvention, to shed light on the literature at the door. It’s here. Don’t let it slip off the cliffside.
Kate Gale is the publisher of Red Hen Press and author of the forthcoming memoir “Little Soldiers.”
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