Wolfman Books
I’ve been to a lot of bookstores in my lifetime. Used bookstores crammed with dust-coated hardcovers. Chain bookstores with coffee shops and comfy chairs. Charming local spots brimming with nooks, crannies, and spot-on staff picks. First-edition bookstores full of rare finds and security guards trailing my every move. Small town bookstores with chatty owners who have tons of recommendations. Even a few impressively ornate and marble-clad big-city bookstores. But never before have I been to a bookstore like Oakland’s Wolfman Books.
Wolfman Books is quirky, unconventional, and very much of its milieu. It’s also a serious contender for the hotly contested (who am I kidding!?) title of my favorite Bay Area bookshop, and the hands-down winner for most multihyphenate bookshop in America. According to the store website’s charmingly breathless description, Wolfman is “two small bookstores, a small press, event space and multi-use arts-hub in Oakland, CA. We carry all sorts of books and greeting cards and some posters and we’ve got lots of lovely discount books and used books and small press books and art books and zines and weird limited edition stuff/rad book ephemera and there's a small gallery in the back we use for different things and we host tons of events, and lots of people come into the store every day, sometimes just to say hi, and anything could happen at any minute at this rate.”
I stopped by (just to say hi) a few days ago, during a whirlwind work trip to San Francisco. Wolfman is a tiny shop on a fascinating block – it’s across the street from the now-shuttered Oakland Tribune, a few doors down from an odds-defyingly-delicious vegan pho place I’ve come to love, and teems with street life all the way from Broadway to Franklin Street.
Inside, the store is lovely in a 90s collegiate way. A whole section is dedicated to zines, books of all stripes mingle haphazardly, and shelves are constructed from salvaged wood. A jar on one of those shelves collects funds in honor of the victims of Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire, and, as the woman running the store told me, the bookstore's role in the community is extensive. Wolfman lets local painters showcase their work on its walls, has an artist-in-residence program, and shares its storefront with a radio station, skateboard maker, and small press. It’s awesome. After about 30 minutes of pawing around, I walked out with a fresh perspective on Oakland and with two of Wolfman’s publications – the New Life Quarterly and a copy of Meagan Day’s Maximum Sunlight. Next time you're in Oakland, come see me at the Claremont and then head downtown to check this place out for yourself.
