Writing Shotgun

AUTHOR RAY BRADBURY PLANS ACRES OF BOOKS VISIT

Theo DouglasTue. June 24
 

Noted science fiction author Ray Bradbury plans to visit Acres of Books tomorrow at 1 p.m., his health permitting.

It’s not for sure, cautions publisher Craig Graham, whose Los Angeles-based imprint Graham Press recently reprinted the fanzine Futuria Fantasia, the Pulitzer-cited writer’s very first, self-published work–but both men are eager to make the trip.

“We tried to do this about a month and a half ago and he wasn’t able to make it,” Graham said of Bradbury, author of such classics as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. “He loves the place and he always wants to go there.”

(So give him some space! Let the man look at a book. Ask Dennis Rodman to sign your bra. Remember Dennis Rodman?)

“He just likes the experience of being in the place. He likes books on dinosaurs. He likes the smell of books, old wood bookcases, the whole disappearing world,” Graham said. “I think he sees bookstores like a time machine because they have the history of the whole human race in them.”

Bradbury, who turns 88 in August, suffered a stroke in 1999, but it hasn’t slowed him much. As the New York Times reported last year, he’s still writing–dictating his works via telephone to his daughter in Arizona.

And the man who called Acres “a labyrinth, a tomb, a catacomb, a maze” in California magazine 26 years ago calls the store “every couple of months, manager Raun Yankovich said today.

“I haven’t met him. But I’ve talked to him on the phone,” Yankovich said.

The City of Long Beach, of course, exercised eminent domain to purchase Acres of Books’ 1924 location at 240 Long Beach Blvd. for $2.8 million earlier this year.

It plans to replace the bookstore with a mixed-use development that will some day take up the entire Broadway Block of land bounded by Third Street, Broadway, Long Beach Boulevard and Elm Avenue.

Terms of the sale specify that Acres of Books has one year to vacate the premises once escrow closes–meaning this could well be Bradbury’s last visit to the former used car lot and country dancehall turned bookstore.

“Tell everyone we’re still open,” Acres owner Jackie Smith said when I visited the store–a city historic landmark–recently. But Smith also said the store could close as soon as October.

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