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Cat at Gatsby Books, Long Beach, Calif. Photos by Peter
Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper. |
Secondhand bookshops may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Southern California, but there are some good ones here.
Gatsby Books in Long Beach, welcomes crime writers in to give readings, and I bought a handsome book on Long Beach architecture in its local-history section.
Booktown USA in Anaheim offers antiquarian books, a big mystery section, and shelves full of Western and men's adventure books, which one does not often see these days. I bought titles in the Executioner and Destroyer series, a Pocket Books edition of Donald Westlake's
The Hot Rock, and a nice old hardback called Pictures of the Gold Rush, and I got change back from a twenty-dollar bill. You might well stop there on your way to Disneyland or the Mexican border. No cat there that I could find, though.
And, because one must keep up one's strength while buying books ...
(For more independent bookshops,
go here. For more In-N-Out Burgers, go anywhere in Southern California. You can't miss them.)
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Don't let me forget
Dave's Olde Book Shop, in Redondo Beach, where I bought
Line of Fire, by Donald Hamilton.
© Peter Rozovsky 2014Labels: bookstores, Booktown USA, California, Dave's Olde Book Shop, Gatsby Books, independent bookstores, what I did on my vacation
9 Comments:
Was this the bookstore right across from the the Hyatt? I wanted to go in, but never quite found the time.
No, I visited the one across from the Hyatt Sunday afternoon, but that was not it. Gatsby is in Long Beach, but a good, long drive from the Hyatt.
I've been to the one in Anaheim, and when you were there, you were close to Book Carnival in Tustin, which is an excellent mystery new/used store.
I sure do miss In- 'N'-Out Burger! Haven't had one since moving to Oregon, except for a trip to LCC last spring.
I'll keep Book Carnival on my list, though I may I have bought something from them at Bouchercon, where they had a table in the book room.
My meal at In-and-Out Burger was pretty damn good.
Hard to find a better graphic than In n Out.
Long live the independent bookstores. We have none in my Redneck Rivera hometown, but we have a great used bookstore that somehow survives. We I given a choice, I would always prefer the used bookstores.
"Were I given a choice" is the correct phrase. Damn my increasingly senile mind, my cataract-clouded eyes, and my arthritic fingers -- bad recipe ingredients for blogging and comment.
Shelley: Yep. There's is lots of good mid-20th-century design all over Southern California. And all those neon signs!
R.T., I prefer to think that your fingers can't keep up with your mind. And I visited two more bookstores Saturday. This will likely constitute the substance of Sunday's post.
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