Papa Bach

Back in the day on Santa Monica Blvd, out near Sawtelle, as I recall, was a small storefront bookstore named Papa Bach’s. I associate the place with my literary first kiss, or at least with my awakening of desire. I had always been a reader, mostly comics when I was quite young, then the entire 36 volume Hardy Boys series, read in numerical order. These were followed by a love affair with short stories: O’Henry, Poe, De Maupassant, Mark Twain…accessible stuff. In high school, I discovered Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Salinger, which kept me entertained for several years. But it is a moment at Papa Bach’s that becomes the watermark in my memory of my life in books.

Papa’s was one of those great used bookstores that stacked more volumes than should be reasonably stored into a space better meant for a small clothing store or barbershop. It was political, subversive, bohemian…wonderful. The walls were covered with obscure quotes from books that had to be identified by patrons in order to get a free book and your name under the correctly identified quote. The place was like a small, messy chapel to honor words. I even liked the look of those who browsed there: men with beards, women in peasant dresses and vests and no make-up. My memory has me at about 17 or 18 years old, standing tenuously on the brink of my life, not yet drafted, not yet anything, wallowing in my own potential and the romance of possibilities before me. It was there that I was poised when I found myself standing in front of the shelf labeled “Classics”. There were the writers that I had come to know and so many that I did not know, but whose names seemed like music: Voltaire, Homer, Victor Hugo, Bronte, Dickens, Dumas, Dostoyoevsky, Tolstoy.  Oh, we had labored through Great Expectations in 10^th grade English, then Billy Budd and a little Shakespeare and such, but these were exercises in boredom for the way they were approached in class…like literary cadavers, sucked clean of any life. I can so clearly recall standing in front of all those names and being imbued with the desire to know them all, to read broadly and deeply until I could consider myself an educated man. I set myself on a ten year course of reading that slowly bled into a lifetime.

Of course it was years before I learned that knowledge is like an island: the larger it gets the greater the shoreline of the unknown. On my path I have come to know truly educated people, not just people who read names, but read subjects, people who know history in a way I will never, who read great literature in many languages in a way I can never, who understand science, math, economics, and art in ways that I bow to but will never experience. By the time I got a degree in English Literature and another in Philosophy, I realized that my corner of the educated world was quite small and, coincidently, impractical. Thus I headed to grad school to create a life in education. A school that I subsequently ran for a couple of decades adopted as its motto the Spanish phrase “Aun Aprendo”, I am (still) learning. It was lifted from a self-portrait by Goya, painted in his later years. I concur, that life, among other things, is a long process of learning and I have tried to be open to it. (As I also learned that we must relearn lessons again if we fail to benefit from the first time around.)

I grieved when I learned that Papa Bach’s closed about 1984 under the pressure of Borders and B. Dalton in, which have subsequently fallen under the boot of Amazon. There are few great bookstores left. San Francisco has had the wisdom to declare City Lights as historical. In Ojai, we are blessed to have Bart’s Books, one of the best and last great bookstores to which I have given my undying fidelity and most of my volumes over the years. It pleases me to see people come to Bart’s as if on a pilgrimage, and it pleases especially when those people are young. Just last month, I watched a boy who could not have been more than 12, standing in the middle of a room set aside for classic literature. I wanted to hug him or buy him a book, but these times do not smile on such behavior from old guys, so I just nodded and left him to his thoughts and he in turn left me with these.