A bookstore on Fourth Street? Totally
By Cornel Bonca

The city’s micro-business district on East Fourth Street near Junipero is showing its age, and that’s good. Sure, vintage furniture stores like Déjà Vu, The Starlite Room and Xcape, and vintage clothing shops like Meow and Sneaky Tiki have beaten you with midcentury for 20 years (’50s gabardine shirts/big-E Levi’s/George Nelson benches). But now Fourth is getting maybe the one thing it lacks—maybe the one true mark of a mature clientele, and no, not a video store (or a record store. Ingrates!). It’s getting a book store.

It’s getting Open, which just moved from its former digs on the fringes of downtown in the East Village Arts District to a new address in the middle of so-called Retro Row—seemingly a good fit, though capitalism will decide that. Owned/operated by Sé Reed and Shea Gauer, two young artist-entrepreneurs, Open could become one of those cultural hubs that any city needs if it’s to break out into artistic significance.

Sé and Shea worked inside the Barnes & Noble/Borders circle of hell for a dozen years between them before they convinced the Long Beach Business Development Center in 2003 to back them in a used bookstore on Linden Street, just east of downtown. They built a loyal following in that loft-dense area during those three and a half years, but when their lease was up they decided to bolt for the artier (and more financially accommodating) Fourth Street.

The new Open will sell As I Lay Dying to any modernist brooder who happens by on his way to Portfolio, plus a wide and carefully handpicked selection of cool books that Sé says she and Shea (say that fast three times) have chosen specifically for their clientele, whom she defines as “not necessarily hip, but aware, and open.” (Hence, um, the name.) And Open is open: for a bookstore that resolutely avoids the Grishamization of the literary world, for a bookstore that assumes the customers’ “openness” means a desire to be challenged, the store, like its owners, is playful, laid-back, friendly, warm. Playful enough to have an original copy of the Penthouse that first featured Anna Nicole Smith on the cover (it’s in a glass case), a twirlable rack of comic books, and enough bric-a-brac to make the whole place homey.

And still serious, courtesy of good books, frequent exhibitions by local artists, and the potential for conversation with patrons who are almost as interesting as you are. (I could listen to you for hours!) Oh, and a new stage where the owners promise not only to put on acts like the Free Moral Agents (headed up by Mars Volta keyboardist Ikey Owens) but what Sé calls “sound art,” an emerging form in which artists use sound (electronic, organic, whatever) in ways that result not exactly in “music” but in interesting/provocative/beautifying noise combinations that warrant an entirely new artistic genre.

Sounds pretty open to me.

OPEN, 2226 E 4TH ST, LONG BEACH 90814.