While San Francisco's dot-com market continues to shrink, booksellers in the city are expanding.
The Warming Hut Bookstore and Cafe opened in late June in the newly restored Crissy Field section of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area of the Presidio. Set just a few feet from the waters of the bay, the store boasts some of the finest views in the city. Browsers can watch ships slip between the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge or follow the sails of a hundred windsurfers.
Managed by the nonprofit Golden Gate National Parks Association, which also operates several other stores in the park system, the store's stock of roughly 1,000 titles focuses primarily on California and Bay Area history and environmental sustainability. Guide books to local seashore and wild areas are highlighted as well as children's books on regional history and ecology. Since Crissy Field was a military airport and staging area during WWII, aviation history is also a specialty. The recent restoration of the waterfront to a natural wetland has attracted thousands of visitors, bicyclists, joggers and dog walkers, who, according to manager Beverly Cunnane, have made business "better than we could have expected and sales continue to grow. We also have a large section of canine interest for all the dog walkers." The association also opened a much smaller store at the new Crissy Field Center in May.
Black Oak Books of Berkeley, which opened its first San Francisco store on Irving Street last year, has opened a second city location, this one on Broadway at Columbus. The new store, which took over the space formerly occupied by Columbus Books, reflects the mix of the other Black Oak stores, mostly used, some new. This store will specialize in remainders and will trade in rare and out-of-print books. While the store opened for business in June, aesthetic improvements have delayed a grand opening until mid-September. Although the new Black Oak is just across the street from City Lights, the neighbors see no cause for alarm. According to Black Oak bookseller James Kelly, "It's a different market, and most of the stock in the two stores will not intersect. We have even discussed the possibility of joining with City Lights for some author events."
Borderlands Books, specializing in science fiction fantasy and horror, has expanded into a new location on Valencia Street. The new 2,000-sq.-ft. space is double the size of the store's previous space on Laguna Street.
According to Borderlands owner and founder Alan Beatts, the move this June represented steadily increasing sales and demand at the specialty store. While Borderland previously stocked a 75/25 mix of new and used titles, the new store will strive for a more even 50/50 mix. "We hope to eventually stock every in-print title in the genre," Beatts told PW. "That will mean having a larger number of titles of mainstream and trade publishers than before. In our old space, we focused on smaller presses because they couldn't be found anywhere else. Now we can do both."
Borderlands is just two doors down from Modern Times, one of the city's oldest independents, and a block from Dog Eared Books, a large used books store. "We are mostly glad of each other's existence," Beatts adds. "I have somewhere to send customers for things we don't stock. And Modern Times's stock intersects ours very rarely."
