Did you miss me?
Wouldn’t 2020 have been the best year to finally start blogging on a regular basis? A good year to create a writing routine in the midst of a pandemic that caused so many people to hunker down and look inward? 2020, the year of quarantine and uncertainty….wouldn’t THIS be the year that I finally got my shit together?
Obviously, you haven’t met me.
So what does it take for me to finally open up this blog and put fingers to keyboard? Why, an Independent Bookstore Day Crawl, of course!
Usually Independent Bookstore Day is in April, and Mad Shanny and I had started planning for it in February. I wrote out a list of bookstores in the Long Beach area, thinking that this year we could explore closer to home and hit even more bookstores than last year.
And then the pandemic hit and the world was cancelled. And so was Independent Bookstore Day.
Honestly, I didn’t expect it to happen this year. Early on in the pandemic, I knew it would last longer than anyone expected. I could already see how we, as a country, would fuck it all up and so we did and so I’m a cockeyed pessimist.
But they rescheduled it anyway for August 29th and I still wasn’t sure if we would do our crawl. I’d seen Mad Shanny once since the pandemic started, seated on a lawn across from my apartment with our other friend, all staying socially distanced while we ate fried chicken on July 4th. And then she went out of state to stay with family and I wasn’t sure when she was going to come back.
She sent me a text a few weeks ago, asking if we were still on for Independent Bookstore Day. Well, hell yes, my friend!
I sent her the list I wrote out back in February, but we decided not to use that one at all and deemed a northbound trip up the coast the preferable route this year.
You know what? It was the perfect day for a bookstore crawl.
Biggest lesson from last year: Do not depend on peanut M&Ms for sustenance. And so our first stop was an Italian deli where we got sandwiches bigger than our heads (this would prove beneficial later on).
Ventura, CA
Peirano’s Market
https://www.peiranosmarket.com/
Mad Shanny thinking it through: let’s START the day with nourishment so we aren’t frantically looking for a mini-hummus cup in the middle of a suburban food desert while suffering from severely low blood sugar. Mad Shanny was more familiar with Ventura than I was. I hadn’t been there in 15 years and that main drag sure has changed…..what a lovely area! They had closed off Main Street for pedestrian traffic and expanded outdoor dining. We found free (!) parking and landed at Peirano’s just before a rush. I ordered right after Mad Shanny, so my receipt clearly indicated to the server that Mad Shanny was on the patio and that Giant Dwarf was WITH Mad Shanny on the patio. That gave us a chuckle.
Ventura, CA
The Calico Cat Bookshop
http://www.calicocatbooks.com/
This one was actually my favorite for reasonably-priced vintage and used books. The store was small but easy to navigate. On the top of one pile was a children’s book called The First Thousand Words in French and I just had to get it. I keep thinking I can learn to speak French one day (this is after several failed attempts at Turkish and Polish on DuoLingo, not to mention a disastrous college first year French 101 class). I almost bought a copy of The Master and Margarita, since I have been obsessed with Behemoth since I first heard about the book and have yet to read it. But the copy for sale there had pages literally falling out so it didn’t pass muster.
Ventura, CA
Very Ventura Gift Shop & Gallery
Okay, we were easily distracted. There were a bunch of cool places on Main Street that we didn’t explore, but we did hit up this very accessible and eclectic gift shop. We did not leave empty-handed, making non-book purchases of home décor and a bracelet for Mad Shanny (for those of you who know my co-conspirator here, I was as surprised as you are).
Main Street does have a lot of thrift shops and I do remember that, when I was here 15 years ago, they were known for their straightforward, if politically incorrect names. The Retarded Children’s Thrift Store has now been more appropriately updated to the ARC Foundation Thrift Store. But the Child Abuse and Neglect Thrift Store remains so named:
Bank of Books
https://www.facebook.com/bankofbooks/
Aptly named. No argument there. This is a GIANT bookstore with a full size basement, all full of books and records and magazines. There are a ton (likely it may even be more accurate to say at least a ton) of vintage books here, and I was tickled to find an entire mini-wall of V.C. Andrews books (I had just finished reading, for the first time ever, Flowers in the Attic).
Mad Shanny found an anachronistic section titled “Westerns/Men’s Adventure” which we found hilarious.
Also, I’ve begun a new obsession in documenting romance titles and cover art featuring Highlanders. It’s a new thing…..the Spazz and I started watching Outlander earlier this year (we made it through the first season, but the generous eye candy (read: Sam Heughan) wasn’t enough to keep me engaged into the second season) and last year’s book crawl introduced me to Soulless, which features Lord Connall Maccon, Alpha of the Woolsey werewolf pack, and where I learned to read Scottish dialect. I think.
Anyway…..
There are quite a few highlander-featured romance novels. Just looking at Sam Heughan makes me understand why.
So it was here that I found a local writer’s novel called Pier Rats (Bruce Greif) because apparently I can’t get enough of Spazz’s relentless search for the perfect wave. But I also bought a copy of Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, a book I’ve been wanting to read since it won the Newberry Medal when I was in elementary school. Mad Shanny took a leap of faith and bought a grab bag with the label “R” on it (for “Romance”).
Bank of Books is so enormous it would require a weekend sojourn in Ventura to truly explore the store. Which I’d be more than willing to do.
We walked back down Main Street, painfully aware that time was escaping us. It is ironic that, on Independent Bookstore Day, the bookstores don’t actually extend their hours (I get it for this year, when COVID is keeping folks away, but they didn’t do it last year either). We honestly only had about 6 hours to get to 5 bookstores and you know that the Giant Dwarf and Mad Shanny have extreme difficulty limiting our time in bookstores to begin with.
So now it was time to leave Ventura and drive a bit more north. We headed up to the Montecito area of Santa Barbara to check out one of the older bookstores in the mix, operating since 1925.
Santa Barbara, CA
Tecolote Book Shop
https://www.tecolotebookshop.com/about-tecolote
Turns out that the old, venerated bookstore on our list also has the most limited hours. They are not open on the weekend, and obviously didn’t feel the need to be open on a day celebrating the independent bookstore. This was a disappointment to us, but also a blessing……more time for the last two bookstores!
Back to the car and back on the road!
Santa Barbara, CA
Chaucer’s Books
https://www.chaucersbooks.com/
Here there was social distance line. When we finally got in, Mad Shanny headed straight for the Fantasy/SciFi area and I just went straight up the middle aisle and landed in Mythology. Bonus! (Little known fact about Giant Dwarf: during my senior year at Smith, I considered three different graduate programs: Puppetry, Folklore, Clown College in Florida – the latter not technically being an academic graduate program but possibly being the most marketable option; of course, I did none of these and ended up a starving theatre artist for several years.) I instantly found Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology (OHMYGOD I LOVE Neil Gaiman and I have yet to read this one) but then, while scanning the shelves, found The Dictionary of Mythology. It was a sheathed hardback book and there were two copies. I opened it up to a random page and instantly fell in love. But I don’t need this. But I want it. But it’s crazy to buy this! But it’s so much cheaper than I expected it to be. Okay, easy enough: Mad Shanny knows I have a hoarding problem so I’ll just show this to her and she’ll tell me not to buy it.
I found Mad Shanny still in SciFi, showed her the book and said “talk me out of it.” She took one look at it and said, “I want this book!” THANK THE GODDESSES THAT THERE WERE TWO COPIES on the shelf, just waiting for the both of us. Yep, we each bought a copy.
Ask me anything about mythology: I’ve got a sourcebook now.
We had less than an hour left. We headed to the State Street area of Santa Barbara:
Santa Barbara, CA
The Book Den
https://www.bookden.com/about-the-book-den/
This bookstore, established in 1902, was Mad Shanny’s favorite. I, too, loved the layout and the seemingly very curated collection of vintage books. Unfortunately, their vintage books were not as low-priced as The Calico Cat so I was heartbroken that I couldn’t afford Winnie the Pooh written in Esperanto (Winnie-La-Pu). Here is another language I aspire to learn yet know I will never do so.
I did end up buying two vintage children’s books: Farewell to Manzanar (by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston), another book I have been wanting to read for many years, as well as a Golden Book: Richard Scarry’s Best Little Word Book Ever! Because, as you can see from above, I love word books in any language.
Mad Shanny then showed me a book by a Polish author that she thought I would like. I was on the fence, but then found an earlier title by the same author that won the Nobel Prize for Literature: Flights by Olga Takarczuk. So I bought that one too.
We stayed until they closed and then we explored State Street from the Book Den’s location on Anapamu Street all the way down to the beach. Saturday night on State Street was hopping, maybe a bit too much in this time of pandemic. Most people were masked, but social distancing was not a priority.
Santa Barbara, CA
Lokum
We couldn’t find a place we actually wanted to eat. The restaurants were not honoring the six-feet apart rule and we really wanted something fast but not fast food. After a very long walk to the beach and back, we ate the other halves of our Peirano’s sandwiches in the car and then headed back down the coast with our newfound treasures.
And we didn’t eat a single peanut M&M on this trip.
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