Jewel to Jewel in Four Blocks

I wondered as I visited Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz how a city of 55,000 supported two independent bookstores within four blocks of each other with a Borders plopped in between them — almost a bookstore for each block of this quaint street. It’s easier to understand once you visit them, Bookshop Santa Cruz and Logos Books and Records have distinct personalities and Borders, well, is Borders, I didn’t need any magazines so I didn’t stop there.

Bookshop Santa Cruz

Bookshop Santa Cruz is a wonderful example of a community bookstore. When I asked for recommendations, the clerk pointed out the community member recommendations bookshelf. Every month a name of a community member is drawn who then recommends several books. The current community member is a friend of the clerk and she enjoyed all of the recommended books. I found an interesting book that I’ll be talking aobut in a later post. Additionally, there are staff recommendations shelves, recommendation cards throughout the store and signs pointing out which books are most popular in Santa Cruz.

This summer the store started a monthly Community Book Group with a local author, a moderator and whoever from the community can attend that evening. The store gives a 10% discount on the chosen book the month before the event. In August, Jonathan Frazen discussed The Corrections, it’s nice to see that he is more open to book discussions since the Oprah debacle. The sense of community interaction with Bookshop Santa Cruz goes on and on, they have a photograph contest for local photographers, an annual short story contest for local writers, a readers club that awards repeat purchases along with exclusive invitations, a gift service (Bookshop Santa Cruz Selects) where hand selected books are sent (gift wrapped, I love it when other people wrap) to the recipient quarterly, bimonthly or monthly.

One of my favorite community aspects is Trusted Source, a list of recommendations from local experts about their area of expertise. When I visited, the Trusted Source was the Music Director and Conductor of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and he recommended five books, two of which I’ve read so I felt intellectually affirmed. I so fell in love with this idea that Claire and I are planning to add a similar page to the website, if you have any ideas about who to contact as an expert, be sure to let us know.

Bookshop Santa Cruz recently celebrated its 40^th anniversary and management was passed to a new generation as the owner’s daughter took over running the store. The store was hard hit by the 1989 Loma Prieta quake and had to exist in a tent (Booktent Santa Cruz) for three years until its present location on Pacific Avenue was ready. On moving day, scores of volunteers showed up to carry books from the tent to the new store. Community involvement flows both ways in Santa Cruz.

The store is a delight to wander through, it’s large airy and light. A friend who visited the store took a great inside shot; check it out on her blog. A few organizational tidbits I really liked – there were Young Adult bookshelves in both the adult fiction section and the children’s section. YA books have an adult following (especially among those of us who are in book groups with our kids) and it’s terrific to see shelves of books that have a crossover appeal. In the children’s section, there are tables dedicated to specific genres such as mystery or historical fiction, plus lists on the walls of the top ten books in the genres. What a gift to adults looking for books for children. My daughter has specific tastes, so I scanned the lists to see what she hadn’t read and actually came up with one or two choices.

Bookshop Santa Cruz is very supportive of local book clubs. They have a set of bookshelves with the club’s monthly picks, and if the club is registered with the store, the members receive a discount with on the book. What really impressed me was the quarterly book club mixer where there is a presentation, in the past a publisher has spoken, and people who are searching for a book group attend along with providing an evening out for an existing book group.

Logos Books and Records

I’m always hesitant about used bookstores, some have gems just waiting to be found while others feel like someone’s crammed garage. Logos Books and Records is an excellent example of a used bookstore. It was huge, the size of a large local library, extremely well organized with interesting books, not stacks of old textbooks or paperbacks with wrinkled covers. The front half of the top floor had shelves of fiction, but most prominent are the shelves of art books, truly beautiful books. The back half of the store was music. We showed the kids an old 45 and explained what an A side and a B side meant, they looked bewildered. One of them asked, is that like an iTune on each side? The people around us chuckled. We described how you put an extra gadget in the larger hole of the 45 so it would fit on the record player; my daughter has little to no experience with a record player (we gave ours away years ago) so she looked at it like I examine a crank to start a car.

Logos has the type of books you’re looking for in a used bookstore, lovely hard back editions of Winston Churchill’s History of World War II, or The Decline of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, I was tempted to buy them because they would look good on my bookshelves. I have a rule that I can’t buy something that I’m not going to read or it’s very likely that I’m not going to read (I have lots of books that I haven’t read, but I intend to read them), but maybe it’s time to re-think that rule.

Bookshop Santa Cruz
1520 Pacific Avenue
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Tel: 831.423.0900

Logos Books and Records
1117 Pacific Avenue
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Tel:831.427.5100