Thanks to a very generous message from blueoregon, whose grandparents lived near the bookstore and who visited the bookstore nearly every summer, we get to memorialize an institution that might have been the first business of any kind to open in San Pedro and has been the longest-operating bookstore in the city of Los Angeles. The store will be closing its doors August 6 after doing business for 104 years there, after it helps celebrate the 125th anniversary of the founding of San Pedro. If you live in the South Bay or in Long Beach, now is your chance to go say goodbye.
We're depressingly familiar with this scenario. A community is anchored by a bookstore, and then changing technology and the internet make it impossible for the bookstore to stay in business. That's what happened in San Pedro (pronounced San PEED-ro by everyone in Southern California), the southern most outpost of the City of Los Angeles, connected by a thin corridor to the rest of the city when the city fathers decided they needed a port.
It's supposed to be the oldest-operating bookstore in Los Angeles; it's actually the oldest-operating bookstore in the same community, as it opened in 1909. It even has a website.
Although the first bookstores opened in downtown Los Angeles in the late 1860s, these early stores had all been closed by 1910. The bookstore opened by Adam Clark Vroman in 1894 is still in operation, but it's in Pasadena, and the one opened by Ernest Dawson (you'll meet him in a later diary) in downtown Los Angeles in 1905 is now being run by his grandson in Larchmont Village, a small but chic shopping district halfway between downtown and Beverly Hills. As the
Daily Breeze observes:
Opened in 1909 by E.T. Williams, an immigrant from Wales, Williams' has spanned several generations of San Pedro residents. It's a store that stocks books by local writers -- frequently featured at store-sponsored book signings on First Thursdays -- and other titles that cater to the community. Waiting on the front counter for customer special-order pickups Friday were copies of "Croatia Uncensored" and "Komiza: Land of My Forefathers."
Yes,
San Pedro was settled by fishermen and sailors from the eastern Mediterranean, especially migrants from the east coast of the Adriatic. You will look in vain for information like that on its website.
The Los Angeles Times provides the ownership succession of the bookstore:
Williams' Book Store was opened by E.T. Williams, a Welshman who landed in San Pedro and decided to stay. When he died in 1940, it passed to his daughter Ethel; in 1941, when Anne Gusha graduated from college, she began working at the store full time. Ethel brought Anne and then Jerry into the business, and in 1980, the Gushas took ownership of the bookstore.
Hard work and perseverance kept the bookstore open, but hard work and perseverance can't fight the big stores, much less the Kindle and the Nook. As one of the store's long-term customers, Helen Cooper, told the
Daily Breeze
Closing the store . . . "is almost like taking a human being and shooting them in the head."
Treasure your local bookstore. Every so often, forget that using online bookstores can get you airline miles and patronize one of them. I'm going to try very hard to do that.
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