Author: Jacob Surpin
Spring Street runs through the heart of Downtown Los Angeles, serving as one of the main pipelines for cars and bikes in the area. Visitors on the street are met with the unexpected, however, in the windows of the former Citizens National Bank Building. Once a bank office, the windows now advertise The Last Bookstore, a bastion of the printed word that is well worth the trip.
Caught between the downtown high rises and the extreme poverty of Skid Row, the Last Bookstore presents a narrative every bit as compelling as the thousands of books that it sells. Through the store’s post-apocalyptic design, the owners raise questions about what the last bookstore would be – what would it look like, what sorts of books would survive, what books people would want to survive. Owner Josh Spencer, however, insists that the design of the store was meant mostly to keep himself interested. “If it was just a boring retail store, I wouldn’t be able to summon the energy needed to take it on. If I put the same fantastic spin on it that I would while writing a story, though, it comes alive,” Spencer said via email.
The bookstore moved into its current space in mid-2011, a 10,000 square-foot space on the ground floor of the now (renamed) Spring Arts Tower. Upon entering, a small cubby-like room that sells used genre-fiction titles for one dollar each opens into a huge high-ceilinged expanse with bookshelves and a small performance space towards the back of the store. Upstairs, in what is called the Labyrinth, 100,000 used books are housed in an ever-growing collection, each also sold for one dollar. The Labyrinth, like the rest of the store, stands out just as much for its aesthetic as for the books that it holds. It has been turned into a community art space, featuring works by local artists such as Dave Lovejoy and Jena Priebe.
Most of the offerings are used books, sold for around five dollars each, but the store is expanding its new selections. “Our goal is to always have the ‘right book at the right price at the right time,’ for every customer,” Spencer said.
And the store contains a wide range of sections in service of that idea: the fiction, history and classics sections on the ground floor are especially impressive, featuring both hard-to-find gems and essential members of the literary canon. Used bookstores often suffer from not being able to entirely control their own stock and selections, but the offerings in the store seem just as well-managed as those of a store selling new books would be.
Perhaps the most encouraging development regarding the store has been the community reaction to it. Community artists have helped design the Labyrinth upstairs, and local volunteers continue to help sort and shelve books in the annex. There is a sense that The Last Bookstore has hit a chord in Downtown LA. “The bookstore was needed and I knew how to meet that need,” Spencer said. “A physical bookstore is for those who love discovery and those who value the look and feel of books.”
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