Seven San Diego Bookshops
Every time I go somewhere, I implicitly play the ‘could I see myself living here?’ game.
Paris passes, obviously.
London too.
Tokyo apart from the impossibility of clothing my nearly six foot tall body there.
And I imagine myself in Los Angeles with surprising regularity, given I’m a woman who hasn’t driven a car since college.
Two weeks ago, when Emmett and I spent a long weekend in San Diego, we played the game explicitly.
Emmett has a thing for sandy beaches, for water sports, and for the kind of ‘every window splayed open’ living that Architectural Digest dubs ‘indoor outdoor.’
I, meanwhile, have a soft spot for California’s woo-woo wellness culture, its casual ease, its eclectic architecture, and its impossible-to-find-elsewhere quality of light.
All of which combined to beg the question: could San Diego – a city reassuringly due west of the terrifying San Andreas fault, and with arguably the best weather in the world – be our post-NYC place? (assuming there even IS a post-NYC place; I’d be extremely content to grow old on the UWS, Nora Ephron style).
Over the course of the trip, the question became something of a punch line.
After eating yet another incredible taco – “Well, I guess we’ll just have to move here.”
After five straight days of June Gloom – “There go our life plans.”
After staring, slack-jawed, at listings in the windows of reality-TV realtors Oppenheim Group and The Agency – “We better start saving now.”
And, upon crossing the threshold of one magical bookstore after another – “Ok, forget the last one, THIS would be my go-to shop if we lived here.”
And though I did so many things on this San Diego sojourn – driving to Carlsbad to buy vintage 501s from Jean Genie, running jet skis aground in the marina, queuing for ‘abuela Mex’ at Las Cuatro Milpas, finishing my first-and-only half-marathon, and taking late-afternoon naps at our La Jolla Airbnb just a block from Windansea Beach – it’s those bookstores that most made me want to load two kids and an apartment’s worth of stuff into a U-Haul and head west. In five days, I visited seven shops, and left another handful – Bookstar, diesel books, The Book Catapult, and Maxwell’s House of Books among them – on my to-visit list for next time.
Below are some pictures I took as I perused place after place and pile after pile, filling half a carry on with my bounty:
This isn’t my first Verbatim Books – Emmett and I stumbled upon a bookstore by the same name in South Africa seven years ago – but it’s certainly my biggest. Verbatim Books occupies the better part of a city block in San Diego’s North Park neighborhood, and both the neighborhood and the store are bursting with personality. From Nicolas Cage posters to Stephen King cutouts to giant book walls and wild outdoor murals, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
Barrio Logan, San Diego’s historically Mexican neighborhood, was one of my favorite spots in the city. Beyond dripping delicious taco juice all over ourselves, Emmett and I admired the underpass murals of Chicano Park, shopped along Logan Avenue, drank dulce de leche boba at Por Vida, then stopped by Libelula Books, a beautiful shop that sells new and used Spanish and English-language books (and has two cute store cats, Billi and Moo).
This store, man. It’s incredible. It feels like it should be in Big Sur, or the Pacific Northwest, and yet here it sits, its crowded cottage charm incongruous against the backdrop of bougie La Jolla. The owner gives the same speech to every customer – asking them if it’s their first visit, explaining the logic of the store’s layout, and encouraging them to put away their phones (sorry, I couldn’t, don’t hate me!) The store sells new, used, and antiquarian books – everything, really – in a rambling, chaotic, delightfully eclectic setting I could have lingered in all day. This is a seriously special place – neither words nor pictures do it justice –and my top pick of the bookstores I visited by a wide margin.
Fresh off my unsuccessful jet ski ride – I drove into shallow waters, sucked up three golf balls that short-circuited the motor, and had to be towed back to dry land by Emmett – I consoled myself at Mitch’s Seafood and La Playa Books in Point Loma. Turns out, crab cakes and incredible staff picks ARE a cure-all!
It’s also not my first Bluestocking(s), but this bookstore, right in the heart of Hillcrest – San Diegos’ gay village – is uniquely warm and inviting (and the perfect place to kick off Pride month). The staff was friendly, the selection was diverse, and the store had the happy madcap energy of a university bookstore.
Warwick’s may look like a Barnes & Noble, but it’s actually America’s oldest family-run bookstore. The La Jolla location of this San Diego mini-chain has a perfect product assortment: the book buyer is precisely on my wavelength with tons of art books, buzzy literary fiction, and ‘buy it for the cover’ contemporary picks.
Just down the street from Bluestocking in Hillcrest, Footnote Books is a lovely little warren of nooks and crannies – and just the right amount of dusty and musty!
