When your parents are no longer together, and neither lives within a thousand miles of where you grew up, when your friends and family are scattered across the country, and when you haven’t spent more than a year or two in one place without moving during your adult life, what is the place you go home to? What place serves as the nucleus of your life, where, no matter how things change, you can always count on to keep you grounded? For me, that place has been Leon’s Bookstore. And as of next month, Leon’s – my home away from home – is shutting its doors forever.
Leon’s Bookstore has been a San Luis Obispo institution for 39 years. Before it was a used book shop, it was Leon’s Toy Store. Speak to anyone who grew up in San Luis in the 60s and they’ll probably have memories of that checkerboard floor and old Leon who gave out the candies. I never knew that part of the store’s history, but my aunt and uncle and their friends and family still remember. At some point, Leon decided to make a thing of collecting globes. By the 80s, the store must have had a couple hundred globes topping the shelves around the store (not for sale, mind you). Amidst the ever-more-outdated traditional globes, there were a few oddities like the globes of the Moon and Mars, and a few that opened up to reveal secret compartments. Well into the 90s, then retired Leon would still pick up any globe that he spotted at a garage sale and bring it to the store.
I don’t remember when I first visited Leon’s Bookstore, but I don’t remember a time, from when I first moved to California in 1982, when I didn’t know the place. My dad’s first job in this state was working there at Leon’s. His friendship with Rick, the owner—son-in-law of the eponymous “Leon” – that lasted well beyond his short employment there, kept me tied to the bookstore throughout my childhood. I went camping with the owner and his wife in Big Sur. I visited their home and played Wizards and Warriors and Tetris on the Nintendo system that my parents would never let me have. The bookstore itself was like a lending library, where, starting with Garfield and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, and moving on to 80s fantasy fare like Dragonlance and Terry Brooks’ Shannara, I developed a book habit. For a few years there, my mom relocated us some 25 miles away, so my trips to Leon’s became less frequent, confined largely to visitation weekends and “Farmer’s Market” nights, when the city hub would be closed to traffic and vendors and performers would take over the downtown strip. It was during these years that I first met Susie and Brent, Leon’s two longest-lasting employees. I was just a precocious, socially maladjusted kid who would rather do “volunteer work” shelving books than deal with life outside.
In the summer of 1991, after a few years away from San Luis, I switched parents, moving from my mom and stepdad’s ranch, to my dad’s tiny apartment situation in San Luis. Once again, Leon’s Bookstore was just a short walk away. That summer, when I turned 14, I went legit with my volunteer shelving, becoming an actual summer employee at Leon’s. Truth be told, there wasn’t a lot of interaction with books that first year. Most of my time was spent tarring the rooftop, painting the walls and mopping toilets. When I did get to deal with books, it usually involved hauling them in and out of storage. Back in those days, I don’t think Brent particularly liked me – that relationship would take time to develop. Susie, however, became my big sister right off the bat. The best times to work where when Susie was in charge, as she would basically let me manage myself. That first summer I made $1,600 – not bad a bad raise from the $500 a summer I’d been making raising sheep for 4-H. (With the added benefit of knowing that the fruit of your labors wasn’t destined for the slaughter.)
The next summer was more of the same. During my Junior year, when I was 16, I started working weekends. Senior year, I added a few weekday evening as well. I worked full time during Junior College, and summers once I moved away to USC. I gradually moved up from doing the schlep work to working the register and cataloging and taking books in for trade credit and cash. Rick would take me along to estate sales and house calls to purchase stock for the store. I got my own key and opened and closed shop as assistant manager – a key that I have to this day (unbeknownst to Rick) and have used to take a visitor to my old haunt under cover of night.
Thanks to my time at Leon’s, books were no longer just things to be read – they were commodities with a value that could be calculated by those in the know. The standard used book practice is to sell at half of retail. That’s simple enough with books still in print, but when you’re dealing with books ten, twenty or a hundred years old, many more factors come into play. Being able to read when a book’s oldness and esoteric subject matter made it a treasure as opposed to trash was like a secret language that I became more and more fluent in the longer I worked with it (and I barely scratched the surface of that world).
As exciting as the books themselves could be, Leon’s Bookstore isn’t my home because of books – it is the people that I’ve met there who have made me who I am. Rick and Cathy, Brent and Susie, Joe and Jean and Rose and Sean and many other amazing people who were like family to me. For a couple years, there was a core of us, ranging from our late teens through late thirties, who were a tighter family than my own blood. The summer I left for Los Angeles to go to film school – that was my real “coming of age” experience, and Leon’s was the lens through which I entered adulthood. At Leon’s, I saw marriages struggle, affairs fizzle, friendships evolved and lives begun. That a friendship at Leon’s would lead me on one of my greatest adventures into the hills and hollows of West Virginia, and that the ripples that trip would be felt in that community a decade later…it makes me feel like I’m a part of a web of Kurt Vonnegut novels, and it will take a lifetime to sort out the cast of characters. So many memories, so many friendships…
Back to the Book Store that brought about these reminiscences. For a few years now, I’ve harbored fantasies of going back to San Luis and buying Leon’s. I had elaborate plans for how I’d refocus the store’s inventory, remodel the interior to make it inviting for a new generation of children and misfit teens, and innovate with business models to try and keep used books viable. Now that dream will have to stay a dream, as the books and shelves and globes and family go their separate ways. I’ve known for a while now that Leon’s days were numbered. The Used Book market is dying, thanks in the short term to low cost, high volume alternatives like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and the power of the internet in allowing resellers to sell direct. Add to that the changing face of San Luis Obispo, which despite many small town touches, has gradually embraced chain stores for most local commerce, and this week’s news was all but inevitable. I wish I could say that the store’s closing will be a great loss for the community, but I think the city and the store fell out of sync a while back, at least on a practical basis. But for many people, those book-o-philes who liked things the old-fashioned way, San Luis is losing an old friend. And for me and, I’m pretty sure, a handful of others, we’re losing a place that was home.
18 responses so far ↓
1 Fallen Angel Eyes // Apr 28, 2008 at 12:57 am
Thank you for sharing your story about Leon’s. It always breaks my heart when places like that have to close. The town closest to where I grew up is becoming more commercial as well and it feels really strange to go back there and visit and see all those chain stores. Even though the store is closing, I know you’ll never forget it because of the impact it had on you and your life and in telling us about it, it can live on in our hearts too.
Used bookstores are such special places. They’re my favorite type of bookstore. I wonder where the books have been, who had them, why they gave them up. Sometimes I find things inside the books I buy, small clues to the previous owner. A handwritten note here, a bookmark there, stuff like that. I like wondering about the book’s journey from owner to owner and I always like the feeling of buying it and giving it a new home.
I dunno. Maybe I’m just weird
2 Serena // Apr 28, 2008 at 4:39 am
Your so right.
I’m from Holland and I went through the same thing you’re going through now.
I worked in the local library in my town for years and I spend most of my time reading all the books they had instead of helping the customers. my love for book started there. Unfortanely they had to close the library a few years back and it still breaks my heart to walk by. I lost a close friend that day , it wasn’t just a library it was the place where I could sit down in a corner and just read. without anyone bothering me I have been living threw a lot of fantasies with my books in that old place . and its a shame that I can’t go back.
3 Cristin // Apr 28, 2008 at 5:46 am
Wow. That was beautiful. I’m so sorry this place is closing. I want to go there after reading your memoire.
PS: Wizards and Warriors is one of the best original NES games. You just took me way back!
4 Kristi O. // Apr 28, 2008 at 6:29 am
“Saying goodbye, why is it sad?
Makes us remember the good times we’ve had
Much more to say, foolish to try
It’s time for saying goodbye.”
I’ve never held a bookstore so close in my heart, but I do know that if the local comic bookstore ever closed, I’d be devastated. Without that comic book store I wouldn’t have discovered manga, and I wouldn’t have been influenced to keep drawing and improve my art.
Recently the bookstore in the local mall closed, and I still can’t fathom why they did so. I assume it’s because the mall is renovating, so maybe they got kicked out or something, but it was the only bookstore in the area and now others and myself must look elsewhere.
That book store of yours must have been something, I’ve never been in a Used bookstore that was particularily nice…they’ve all been little run down shops with so much clutter everywhere that it’s hard to find the books.
I gave up on Used Bookstores when I went into one, asking if they had any books on Sherlock Holmes, and the owner asked me who the author was. I was dumbfounded and just turned around and left.
Don’t give up your dream, maybe one day you can buy the building Leon’s bookstore was in and renovate it. I’m sure the entire community would thank you for it.
5 Jane Elliot // Apr 28, 2008 at 9:46 am
It’s funny. When I grow older I may look with similar feelings of nostalgia upon the closing of commercial chain bookstores as they too are replaced by the next thing, be it amazon.com or something yet to be conceived. I’ll think with melencholy bliss on the happy times I spent in my youth, hours on end reclining in the comfy chairs at Barnes & Noble, reading anything and everything off the shelves, amid the mingled smells of coffee and paper.
Yet I have also harbored a particular fondness for used bookstores ever since I walked into one in Julian, CA and spotted an old paperback of The Scarlet Pimpernel w/black & white images from the Anthony Andrews film.
6 Helena // Apr 28, 2008 at 10:01 am
This is very touching. Thank you for sharing it with us.
7 Mandy // Apr 28, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I know how you feel. After my mother and stepfather passed away and I moved away from where I grew up, I found out a video store that had always been across the street from the apartment I grew up in, had closed down and been replaced with a Dunkin Donuts. That video store was a fixture of my childhood. In general I perfer book stores, love them. But this particular video store was something familiar and constant through my childhood. I got my first NES there in 1989.
8 jess // Apr 28, 2008 at 4:09 pm
It’s still having the key to a place that you help build that will haunt you — years and years later. But it’s also the tangible proof that the memories you made there were part of reality. Hold on to it.
9 Joel // Apr 28, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Though not as central to my life as to yours, Leon’s has long been an essential part of the landscape of “my” San Luis. I doff my cap to Leon’s and to all that it represents - and to my own youth.
10 The Mom // Apr 28, 2008 at 11:12 pm
What you just wrote would lend itself to a lovely movie.
11 Don // Apr 29, 2008 at 9:32 am
Beautiful piece, your elegy for Leon’s. Thanks Jake. I don’t think I’ll ever delete Leon’s telephone number from my cell phone’s memory. We’ll never forget the night you loped across Higuera to activate your Lego creation in Tom’s Toys for your “grandmother.” Susie’s dad here.
12 Crystal // Apr 29, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Yeah, when I was living with my mom and my grandpa, her dad, when things got rough with my father, I would walk down the street to the local library and emerge myself in the tales of others, relieveing my own pain. I know what it is like to lose a friend and a place like home, I am touched by what you shared with us.
13 lori metzler // Apr 29, 2008 at 2:29 pm
AW Jake, dang it, that made me weep. Thank you.
lori (susie’s sister & tim’s mom)
14 Mollie // Apr 29, 2008 at 3:40 pm
That is a very touching story, I’m sorry =( There was a library near our old house that we’d walk to and get books from when I was a kid, I loved it a lot. Sadly, they also closed up. It was a great place, I miss it.
15 Sara // Apr 29, 2008 at 7:18 pm
That was such a wonderful story, Jake. I feel close to Leon’s, too; I went there several years as a kid, and now I have worked there for four wonderful years, and it’s sad that this is happening. Though i think that from your story, no one could love Leon’s the way you do, and thats wonderful.
16 brent // Apr 29, 2008 at 8:53 pm
This was nice Jake, thank you. You have perfectly articulated what it was to work there, although maybe not work there so much as to be there in that place, in that time. The books were more or less an excuse we used to show up. What you do not say, but what what made us a family in my mind, was that we were all such a bunch of misfits, me, you, Susie, Joe, my dear Rose, Jean, all of us. For my part I loved you all. For me those are still some of the best years of my life. All of you are a part of my living history, told again and again in stories of our adventures, bowling nights, Kitten Boy, Big Earl, the reason the word “evil” is carved in the sidewalk outside of the store. What we we were there is so much deeper than the dust of all those old books. We’ve all seemed to move onto lives that are far beyond anything we could have imagined back then. It is good Jake. I am so very proud of you.
17 Nancy Cauch // May 6, 2008 at 9:22 am
Thank you for this, Jake. Wish I could have made it into Leon’s one more time. Memories of Susie grinning behind the counter will always be with me.
Nancy (another of Susie’s sisters)
18 DEAN // May 8, 2008 at 7:54 am
Across miles and experiences Jake weaves with words. I know the Leon’s crowd by tales and a few telephone calls. Except for Jake and Susie that is, who are real in my life and friends well met.
The end of an era evokes nostalgia and emotion but what a magic place it has been. For me Leon’s will remain a kingdom of oddly matched souls, brilliant minds and caring hearts that time cannot remove- it will live as it always has in my finely fueled imagination, crafted by sharings JUST like this posting. Thank the gods for places like Leon’s.
And for vocies like Jake’s who remind us of our blessings.
smiles from west virginia
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