Marc Fitten's Blog
December 21, 2009
Southern California is gorgeous! The weather is perfect. The people are pretty. It feels like a place with a lot of spare time and money. It's only fitting that any local indie is just as gorgeous. Check these photos out! The Book Works is a fun store in Del Mar with a great location. The Salk Institute is nearby. UCSD is also. It's a book store in a high traffic area in an outdoor mall (The Flower Hill Promenade).
It...
December 14, 2009
Twenty minutes from San Diego is a great seaside town called La Jolla. And downtown on the main strip, in the middle of everything, is Warwick's — a store for books, stationery, gifts, and office supplies.
This is a family owned store — four generations in the making. Like Vroman's it is a store that opened in the nineteenth century.
And there's another similarity to Vroman's in that Warwick's is a local icon, an indelible part...
September 29, 2009
This is the largest and oldest bookstore in Southern California, and by largest I mean nearly Powell's large, and by oldest I mean it opened its doors in 1894. The folks at Skylight Books in L.A. turned me on to it. In fact, they insisted I drive the thirty minutes to Pasadena.
Well, they did me a favor. Vroman's just about floored me when I drove past, parked, and walked in. It sits smack dab in the middle of...
This is a great store in Los Feliz, an East L.A. neighborhood near Griffith Park. It's a hipster neighborhood with a lot of foot traffic, and it's the kind of store that you can immediately tell is thriving.
Again, I feel like I really sold L.A. and Southern California short. There are great bookstores here.
At Skylight, there's the main store — which is a general trade book store, and there is also a newer annex...
I have to admit that I didn't expect much in the way of Los Angeles bookstores after the bonanza by the Bay, but it turns out that L.A. has some really great stores. The first on my list is Book Soup. This general trade store is just up the street from the Viper Room, Whisky A Go Go, and the Roxy Theatre.
I'm not sure what to make of its location – it's all L.A. sprawl to me, but the store has great items. The selection...
September 23, 2009
September 14, 2009
September 7, 2009
September 6, 2009
Big Sur, US 1
I'm a huge Henry Miller fan. In fact, he's partly the reason I ditched college when I was nineteen and took off to live and tramp around Europe. The quality of his writing that I liked best was that he knew how to fashion language in a way that reached ecstasy. He just let it rip, and as a reult his best work had a depth and pathos that made ART. And I really appreciate him as the artist. Getting to visit this spot has always been a dream of mine. 
I...
