Sixteen Bookstores in Eight-Tenths of a Mile
Hollywood Boulevard, Highland Avenue to Argyle, as the Los Angeles Times mapped it in 1976
Esotouric · 11 September 2026
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17Hollywood Boulevard, Highland Avenue east to Argyle — 0.74 miles. Numbered west to east; north side above the Boulevard, south side below. Scroll sideways on a narrow screen.
Ben Reuven counted them in May 1976. “Not counting the porno bookshops and the Christian Science Reading Room, there are 16 general and specialized bookstores along Hollywood Blvd. from Highland Ave. to Argyle Ave., one block east of Vine St.” He found the street “a queasy combination of New York’s 4th Ave. and 42nd St.,” the booksellers sharing their sidewalk with what the straight business community of Hollywood called, collectively, the weirdos. They refused to leave. Jack Garvin of the Hollywood Bookshop had tried Westwood Village in 1971 and was back inside a year. Milt Luboviski of Larry Edmunds: “I’d rather go out of business than move the store.”
North side of the Boulevard, west to east
- 1Collector's Bookstore6763 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood
Sondra Farrell Bazrod put a number on it in 1977 and the number is astonishing: two million movie stills at 6763 Hollywood Boulevard, fifty thousand of them priced at ten cents. Original scripts from the silent era forward — Outlaws of Red River with Tom Mix, Charlie Chan at the Olympics, Earthquake — from $2.50 into the hundreds. Movie magazines in
very fine
condition dating to 1911 at $25 to $30. The shop set out to cover a film from the first draft of the script through the stills, the ads and the clips, and it filled mail orders from around the world. - 2Pickwick BookshopLouis EpsteinHollywood Blvd, Los Angeles
Riley calls it "Lou Epstein's Pickwick (the chain now, which started out as a used and new bookstore)" and places it among the handful of shops already on the Boulevard when Jack Blum arrived in 1950. It appears on the 1976 Times map at the Las Palmas end. The parenthesis carries the whole trajectory: a used-and-new store on Hollywood Boulevard that became a chain, which is what the Boulevard's booksellers spent the seventies refusing to do. ⚠ Position approximate from the 1976 map; no street number appears in any article we hold.
- 3Pantages (bookshop)Hollywood Blvd near Las Palmas Ave, Los Angeles
One of three shops drawn side by side near Las Palmas on the 1976 Times map, with Pickwick and Fred Dorsett, at the Boulevard's densest point. ⚠ Name and position only; no proprietor, no specialty, no street number in any article we hold. The clustering is the information — three bookstores in a single short block, which is what Ben Reuven meant when he wrote that nowhere else in Southern California could a reader find sixteen bookstores within comfortable strolling distance on one street.
- 4Fred DorsettFred DorsettHollywood Blvd near Las Palmas Ave, Los Angeles
A bookseller trading under his own name, drawn beside Pickwick and Pantages near Las Palmas on the 1976 Times map. ⚠ Name and position only. A shop named for a man rather than a subject or a street usually meant a dealer whose judgment was the stock — the sort of business that does not survive its proprietor and leaves almost no record when it ends. That he is on the map at all, between two better-known neighbours, is most of what we can say.
- 5Stanley Rose's BookshopStanley Rose; Larry Edmunds managed itHollywood Blvd near Las Palmas — a few doors from Musso & Frank, 6667 Hollywood Blvd
A few doors from the Musso & Frank Grill at 6667 Hollywood Boulevard, and in the thirties that proximity was the whole point. The roll call of the back gallery runs Faulkner, John O'Hara, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett, Meyer Levin, Fitzgerald, Saroyan, Nathanael West — long Saturday lunches at Musso's and boozy late-night songfests at Rose's. Yelive Moss, who started as a clerk there, remembered it as
the best, the most creative of times.
Larry Edmunds managed the shop before he had his own. ⚠ Position beside Musso's; no street number of its own appears in any article we hold. - 7Book TreasuryHollywood Blvd near Cherokee Ave, Los Angeles
On the 1976 Times map near Cherokee Avenue, on the north side. ⚠ Name and position only; nothing in the text of any article we hold. It stood within a few doors of Cherokee Book Shop and Book City, in the stretch of the Boulevard that by the mid-seventies held the greatest concentration of used books in Southern California — Riley's phrase, and he meant it literally. Fifteen shops within a mile, he wrote, where in 1950 there had been a handful.
- 8Book CityJerry Weinstein, Alan Siegel6627 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles
Twelve years before he opened it, Jerry Weinstein was in the junk business, buying odd lots of lamps and towels. He bought some used books at a nickel each and, Riley wrote, "somehow he knew he'd found the right thing.
Book City opened around 1973 at 6627 Hollywood Boulevard and within two years held 150,000 volumes, the largest stock in Los Angeles, open till ten on weekdays and eleven on weekends. His partner was Alan Siegel. His customers ran from actors preparing parts —
Have you got anything on Rasputin?" asked Jack Palance — to the staff of politicians quietly selling off the boss's library. - 9Cherokee Book ShopJack Blum; Burt Blum (comics)6607 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles
Jack Blum opened on Cherokee Avenue in 1950, recovering from glaucoma and fresh from Chicago and Arizona, and moved to 6607 Hollywood Boulevard. By 1975 he had a hundred thousand volumes and a staff of specialists — Clark Casey,
voluble and raffish,
on Americana; Wayne Braby on military; Oliver Dernberger on cinema. Upstairs was the other empire: a hundred and fifty thousand comic books and a wall of Playboys on the second floor, built by his son Burt, whom Tom Nolan photographed in 1969 and calledthe king of the comics.
Blum at seventy-one:we have weeded out all the very common things.
- 10Hollywood BookshopJack GarvinHollywood Blvd, Los Angeles
Jack Garvin's store, on the 1976 Times map near Whitley, and the source of the single best line about why the trade stayed put.
I moved to Westwood Village in 1971,
he told Ben Reuven,and one year later I was back on the Boulevard. This is still the book center in Southern California.
Reuven had asked whether the booksellers would follow the money west, as everything else in Los Angeles had. Garvin had already tried it. ⚠ Position approximate from the 1976 map; no street number in any article we hold. - 12Atlantic BooksHollywood Blvd near Wilcox Ave, Los Angeles
Marked on the 1976 Times map near Wilcox, on the north side of the Boulevard. ⚠ Name and position only. Its neighbours are documented and it is not, which is the ordinary condition of the trade: a newspaper draws sixteen dots and interviews the four proprietors who will talk. The shops that left no interview left no record, and the map is the only evidence that they were there at all.
South side of the Boulevard, west to east
- 6Larry Edmunds BookshopMilt Luboviski; Din & Phil Luboviski6658 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles
The shop has been at its Hollywood Boulevard address since 1938 and holds what Nolan called
the best collection of books on Hollywood and the theatre to be found in the city.
Larry Edmunds himself was long dead by 1969; before he had his own shop he managed Stanley Rose's, the Boulevard store where the well-paid screenwriters drank away their afternoons. His partners were the three Luboviskis — Din, Phil and Milt. Milt Luboviski told the Times in 1976: "I may be fearful of the Boulevard after dark, but the thought of moving is the most frightening thought of all. I'd rather go out of business than move the store." - 11Bond St. Bookstore1638 N Wilcox Ave, Hollywood
Not on the Boulevard at all, as it turns out: 1638 North Wilcox Avenue, around the corner. The 1976 Times map draws it at the Wilcox end of the south side and gives no number; Bazrod's 1977 directory supplies one, and it is on Wilcox itself. Open noon to half past five every day but Tuesday and Sunday. Posters from the forties and stills running from that decade to the present, one dollar to twenty. A small shop with a narrow specialty in a trade that by 1977 had almost entirely given itself over to the movies.
- 13Baroque BooksHollywood Blvd, Los Angeles
On the south side of Hollywood Boulevard on the 1976 Times map. ⚠ Name and position only in the sources we hold — and a proprietor's name is commonly attached to this shop that appears in none of our articles, so it is not repeated here. What can be said is where it stood: the south sidewalk, among the general and used stores, in the years when the Boulevard was, in Reuven's words, "a queasy combination of New York's 4th Ave. and 42nd St."
- 14Hollywood Book ServiceHollywood Blvd near Cosmo St, Los Angeles
On the south side of the Boulevard by Cosmo Street on the 1976 Times map, opposite the densest north-side cluster. ⚠ Name and position only. The name suggests the mail-order trade that Riley identified as the real economy underneath the storefronts: almost all used bookshops in Los Angeles did half or more of their business through printed catalogues, and since the Depression that business had increasingly been with libraries rather than readers.
- 15Osborne'sHollywood Blvd between Vine St and Argyle Ave, Los Angeles
One of three shops drawn together between Vine and Argyle at the eastern end of the 1976 Times map, with Universal and Marlow's. ⚠ Name and position only. The eastern cluster is the mirror of the Las Palmas cluster at the other end — the run of bookstores did not thin out toward Argyle, it bunched again, which is why Reuven could describe the whole eight-tenths of a mile as a single bookselling district rather than a scattering.
- 16Universal NewsHollywood Blvd between Vine St and Argyle Ave, Los Angeles
Drawn between Vine and Argyle on the 1976 Times map, beside Osborne's and Marlow's. ⚠ Name and position only. A newsstand among bookstores, at the Vine Street end where the studios and the radio buildings were — the trade in current periodicals sitting at the edge of a trade in dead ones. Riley noted that only a few Los Angeles shops kept back numbers of magazines at all; a newsstand is where those back numbers began.
- 17Marlow's BookshopHollywood Blvd between Vine St and Argyle Ave, Los Angeles
The easternmost of the sixteen on the 1976 Times map, between Vine and Argyle. ⚠ Name and position only. Reuven's boundary stops one block east of Vine at Argyle, so Marlow's sits at the very edge of the district as the Times drew it — the last bookstore before the map runs out. Whether anything stood beyond it, the map does not say, and neither does the text.
This frame stops at Argyle because the Times’ own map does.
Larson’s Book Shop and Phil Mason’s are not on it — they stood out at Western Avenue, three
quarters of a mile further east, and they appear on the general map instead. Tom Nolan is the only
writer who went out there, in 1969, and he found the occult trade waiting: Mrs. Larson in the dim
yellow light with the cats and the Crowley, and Phil Mason’s emporium where the bookscouts dug.
Sixteen dots, four interviews. The 1976 map — “Times Map by Bob Allen” — gives sixteen names
and no street numbers. Where a number appears here it came from John Riley’s survey of 11 May 1975,
Tom Nolan’s of 19 October 1969, or Sondra Farrell Bazrod’s collectors’ directory of 15 November
1977, which printed addresses and opening hours for four of them. Amber pins are corners, not
buildings. The shops that left no interview left no address, and the map is the only evidence
they were there at all.