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March 26, 2007

IN LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE: L.A.'S BEST USED BOOKSHELVES & JUDITH REGAN

The current issue of Los Angeles Magazine includes a list of L.A.'s best "Used Bookshelves," which includes the likes of Melrose's Cosmopolitan and North Hollywood's Iliad.  (Thanks to Stephan Clark.)

Not long ago neighborhoods like Hollywood, Westwood, and Long Beach were rife with used bookstores. Wafts of musty leather seduced wayward pedestrians, hinting at the undiscovered texts piled haphazardly inside. But as browsing the aisles has given way to scouring the Amazon, many of L.A.’s best-known purveyors of secondhand books have vanished. (In the last year alone we’ve lost Hollywood Book City, CM in Silver Lake, and Dutton’s in North Hollywood.) Those that remain have a large niche to fill. Where rare and antiquarian bookshops sate the desires of the serious collector, used bookstores serve as part lecture hall and living room, part book club and hiding place.

The same issue also includes Strawberry Saroyan's lengthy look at the Judith Regan fiasco.

Few doubt that Regan, who is 53, will resurface soon. Although she has not spoken publicly, Regan is telling friends that she has lined up investors for a multimedia company. Still, the question remains: How had the woman who’s made it her business to go right up to the line of popular taste—but never cross it—gotten it so wrong this time? And did it have anything to do with her move to Los Angeles?

The first public word that Judith Regan was moving to L.A. came in an April 12, 2005, article on the front page of The New York Times, in which she said that she wanted to be closer to the film and TV industries. The idea that book publishing needed to be in New York was no longer true, she declared. But the comment that generated the most heat was that she “would like to create a cultural center” in Los Angeles. The implication was twofold: L.A. had no culture, and Regan, of all people, was the person to provide it. Within the week The New York Observer ran a cartoon featuring Regan as Gertrude Stein and her authors Jenna Jameson and former baseball slugger Jose Canseco congregating at an “Illiterati” café.

Posted at 10:43 AM in Local Heroes |

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Comments

Daisy Sours

hi
I'm looking for a nice wooden bookshelf about 6inches tall 36 inches wide and deep
enough to put large books. I'm hoping you have something nice under a 100 dollars.
Daisy

Posted by: Daisy Sours | November 23, 2009 at 02:36 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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