A Visit to Bart's Books

Last weekend, TaMara and I celebrated our birthday week (yes, our birthdays are two days (and two years) apart) with a road trip north to one of our favorite beach towns on the Central Coast. On the way there, we opted to try a new route that took us through the charming city of Ojai — a city known for its boutique hotels, recreation opportunities, hiking trails, farmer's markets, and small businesses. 

Ojai is also kinda famous for being the home of one of the most unique bookshops in the United States: Bart's Books! Bart's opened in 1964 and is predominantly an "outdoor bookstore" with over 100,000 books (most of which are used) filling its many shelves. I had heard of this shop years ago, but this was our first time visiting and we were both suitably impressed!

Not only is it a serene shopping experience, it is also expertly presented and the stock is very impressive indeed! Be sure to ask for access to the Rare Books room when you visit. While I walked away with only five vintage paperbacks, I could have easily filled multiple bags with the incredible stuff I found!

If you are ever in the Ojai Valley, I HIGHLY recommend a visit to this fantastic shop. You won't be disappointed!

More Bloody Books!

Today, my friend Mike and I braved the freeways and took a relatively smooth drive south to Long Beach, California to visit Planet Books for our very first time.

Planet Books was one of the many vendors we saw at the recent Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Collectors Show, but neither of us really carved out any time to pore over their wares there so we thought it might be fun to pay them a visit.

The shop is located inside an old warehouse and is quite large, offering thousands of books (including first editions, signed books, and Easton Press leather-bound editions) as well as vintage toys, comics, vinyl records, and other collectibles. Organization is tenuous at best with books stacked floor to ceiling in some places along with dusty cartons on the floors and mountains of file boxes containing choice bagged items set aside for book fairs and the like.

We spent the bulk of our 90 minute visit perusing the shelves of science fiction, mystery, and western paperbacks and both of us came away with armloads of terrific finds, most of which were but a dollar each. All told, I walked out with 13 (lucky) books and spent less than $20.

Note that while the aforementioned boxed and bagged books are priced (and the prices all seemed quite fair for the items I saw), the majority of paperbacks we grabbed were unmarked (assumed to be a buck each) with the owner of the shop making a few on-the-fly price declarations during checkout.

Here's what I walked away with today:

1. Beachheads in Space edited by August Derleth (includes a short story by John Wyndham, one of my favorite authors)
2. Donald A. Wollheim Presents the 1981 Annual World's Best SF (great collection and a DAW book)
3. Donald A. Wollheim Presents the Best From the Rest of the World (DAW)
4. Not Long for the This World by August Derleth (a collection of short stories)
5. Six-Gun Planet by John Jakes ("This is the story of the planet Missouri..." 'Nuff said!)
6. Spell of the Witch World by Andre Norton (the very first book in the yellow-spined DAW Books range)
7. Swords Against Death by Fritz Leiber (I already have an earlier, signed printing of this, so this is a reading copy)
8. The Haunted Strangler by John C. Cooper (cool movie tie-in with a photo of Karloff on the back)
9. The Ship of Ishtar by A. Merritt (a really nice and clean (apart from a little corner damage on the cover) Avon printing)
10. The Silkie by A.E. Van Vogt (another yellow-spined DAW book)
11. The Wizard of Lemuria by Lin Carter (Carter's very first novel)
12. Time to Come edited by August Derleth (short stories)
13. Yesterday's Children by David Gerrold (I have another edition of this, but Gerrold is one of my favorite authors, thus I must collect)

If you ever find yourself in the Long Beach area, do make a side trip to Planet Books located at 1855 Freeman Ave, Signal Hill, CA 90755.

Read on, all!