Dog Eared Books
Bookstores have a funny relationship to the cities they inhabit.
Some are like reflections, perfectly emblematic of the places they’re situated. McNally Jackson in SoHo is like that. If you averaged its traits – the brusque staff, the fragrant café, the coin-operated, graffiti-covered bathroom – the output would be a precise homage to its Prince Street address. Books Are Magic is that sort of store too. Its discounted staff picks, tables piled high with sardonic short stories, and shoppers pushing strollers all scream Cobble Hill. The beauty of these bookstores is how they boil down the milieu of a whole area into a single place. To know the bookstore is to know the neighborhood it sits in.
Other bookstores are like time capsules, relics of a different time. Shakespeare & Company in Paris is that way. There’s little to learn about modern Paris by standing shoulder to shoulder with tourists, running your fingertips along the spines of English-language novels. But that unreality doesn’t dilute the store’s overwhelming charm or its ability to transport you to a different time. I’ll never tire of play-acting like I’m Hemingway, sitting at the store’s third-floor desk overlooking the Seine.
And still other bookstores, like Dog Eared Books in San Francisco’s Mission District, sit somewhere in between.
It’s easy to imagine Dog Eared Books as a hangover of a 90s San Francisco I never experienced. With its plain pine shelves, box of free books, and doors pockmarked by leaflets, you don’t have to squint too hard to imagine grunge on the sound system or zines by the front door. There’s something about this store that feels like a literary Empire Records, though in this case the cashier has pink pigtails rather than a shaved head.
Yet today’s Dog Eared Books might just be the countervailing force to San Francisco’s smooth, startup-powered solipsism. As the rough edges of the Mission get ground down, the sense of radicalism that Dog Eared Books retains feels like a statement in and of itself. Pussy Power posters adorn its storefront. A window is papered with dozens of portraits of the dead, from Carlos Fuentes to Donna Summer to Trayvon Martin. The shelves are packed with small press books and the walls are hung with art by local artists. Stacks of On Tyranny sit next to the cash register.
But it would be inaccurate to depict the store as the city’s last bastion of disaffected bohemia. Nehru collars and combat boots, if they ever existed here, have long since ceded territory to a sea of polar fleece and backpacks. I eavesdropped on several book browsers talking amiably about what time they’d catch the Google bus to Mountain View. I saw one man comparing the store’s prices to those offered on his Amazon app.
So is Dog Eared Books a nostalgic trip to the 90s, an antidote to 2018, or simply a lovely place for tech workers to while away the afternoon? It’s possible, I suppose, for it to be all three at once. A place to remember, a place to find solace in, or a place to dip into from time to time. In any case, it’s wonderful.
