Book Soup
Encyclopedia
Book Soup is an independent bookstore
located at 8818 Sunset Boulevard
in West Hollywood, California
, and is the largest general interest independent bookstore in Hollywood. The store is "known for its tall, teetering stacks and mazes of shelves crammed with titles that attracted entertainment and tourist industry clientele..." Popular with many in the entertainment industry, the store continues to hosts events featuring a variety of celebrity authors who have so far included Muhammad Ali
, Howard Stern
, Annie Leibovitz
, Chuck Palahniuk
, Jenna Jameson
, and The Doors
. Considered a "cultural fixture" of the Sunset Strip
, Book Soup has also been featured as a location in a number of films and television shows.
The store was founded in 1975 by Glenn Goldman. Goldman and David Mackler (both in graduate school at UCLA at the time) raised $50,000 and, after doing extensive research on where to locate their store, opened Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard. The rationale for the location, as Goldman explained, was that there "had been a period of upheaval here in the '60s—of thought and ideas—and I felt that the people who lived in the neighborhood would and could really support a bookstore." Book Soup (the name was the least-offensive of those proposed by Goldman and Mackler) was nestled between a head shop
and strip club
. Mackler designed the store's interior.
The store and its staff of two (which included Goldman) struggled for two decades to run a profit. It nearly closed early in its existence, but a publisher's representative helped the store re-establish its credit line and saved the business. In 1985, Book Soup again nearly closed, but another publisher's representative loaned it the money to stay afloat. Book Soup added a storefront newsstand, "News Mews," and began selling thousands of domestic and international periodicals and newspapers. In the late 1980s, Book Soup moved two blocks further down Sunset Boulevard to its current, more spacious location and expanded to 50,000 titles. It also began earning a reputation for art, photography, film and music books as well as for hosting high-profile events featuring authors and celebrities such as Gore Vidal
, James Ellroy
, Mikal Gilmore
, Edward Albee
, Robert Wagner
, and Tom Stoppard
.
A second Book Soup store at South Coast Plaza
in Costa Mesa, California
, opened in 2002 but closed in 2007 due to high rent and the impact of competition from Amazon.com
and large discount chain stores such as Wal-Mart
and Target
.
Goldman announced he was selling Book Soup on January 2, 2009, then died of pancreatic cancer
on January 3, 2009. Vroman's Bookstore
and Book Soup signed an agreement October 9, 2009, to purchase Book Soup.
Independent bookstore
An independent bookstore is a retail bookstore which is independently owned.-Literary and countercultural history:Author events at independent bookstores sometimes take the role of literary salons. The bookstores themselves, "have historically supported and cultivated the work of independent...
located at 8818 Sunset Boulevard
Sunset Boulevard
Sunset Boulevard is a street in the western part of Los Angeles County, California, that stretches from Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Coast Highway at the Pacific Ocean in the Pacific Palisades...
in West Hollywood, California
West Hollywood, California
West Hollywood, a city of Los Angeles County, California, was incorporated on November 29, 1984, with a population of 34,399 at the 2010 census. 41% of the city's population is made up of gay men according to a 2002 demographic analysis by Sara Kocher Consulting for the City of West Hollywood...
, and is the largest general interest independent bookstore in Hollywood. The store is "known for its tall, teetering stacks and mazes of shelves crammed with titles that attracted entertainment and tourist industry clientele..." Popular with many in the entertainment industry, the store continues to hosts events featuring a variety of celebrity authors who have so far included Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali is an American former professional boxer, philanthropist and social activist...
, Howard Stern
Howard Stern
Howard Allan Stern is an American radio personality, television host, author, and actor best known for his radio show, which was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2005. He gained wide recognition in the 1990s where he was labeled a "shock jock" for his outspoken and sometimes controversial style...
, Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz
Anna-Lou "Annie" Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer.-Early life and education:Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Leibovitz is the third of six children. She is a third-generation American whose great-grandparents were Jewish immigrants, from Central and Eastern Europe. Her father's...
, Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk
Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter...
, Jenna Jameson
Jenna Jameson
Jenna Jameson is an American entrepreneur and former pornographic actress, who has been called the world's most famous adult-entertainment performer and "The Queen of Porn."...
, and The Doors
The Doors
The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger...
. Considered a "cultural fixture" of the Sunset Strip
Sunset Strip
The Sunset Strip is the name given to the mile-and-a-half stretch of Sunset Boulevard that passes through West Hollywood, California. It extends from West Hollywood's eastern border with Hollywood at Harper Avenue, to its western border with Beverly Hills at Sierra Drive...
, Book Soup has also been featured as a location in a number of films and television shows.
The store was founded in 1975 by Glenn Goldman. Goldman and David Mackler (both in graduate school at UCLA at the time) raised $50,000 and, after doing extensive research on where to locate their store, opened Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard. The rationale for the location, as Goldman explained, was that there "had been a period of upheaval here in the '60s—of thought and ideas—and I felt that the people who lived in the neighborhood would and could really support a bookstore." Book Soup (the name was the least-offensive of those proposed by Goldman and Mackler) was nestled between a head shop
Head shop
A head shop is a retail outlet specializing in drug paraphernalia used for consumption of cannabis, other recreational drugs, legal highs, legal party powders and New Age herbs, as well as counterculture art, magazines, music, clothing, and home decor; some head shops also sell oddities, such as...
and strip club
Strip club
A strip club is an adult entertainment venue in which striptease or other erotic or exotic dance is regularly performed. Strip clubs typically adopt a nightclub or bar style, but can also adopt a theatre or cabaret-style....
. Mackler designed the store's interior.
The store and its staff of two (which included Goldman) struggled for two decades to run a profit. It nearly closed early in its existence, but a publisher's representative helped the store re-establish its credit line and saved the business. In 1985, Book Soup again nearly closed, but another publisher's representative loaned it the money to stay afloat. Book Soup added a storefront newsstand, "News Mews," and began selling thousands of domestic and international periodicals and newspapers. In the late 1980s, Book Soup moved two blocks further down Sunset Boulevard to its current, more spacious location and expanded to 50,000 titles. It also began earning a reputation for art, photography, film and music books as well as for hosting high-profile events featuring authors and celebrities such as Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
, James Ellroy
James Ellroy
Lee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a so-called "telegraphic" prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black...
, Mikal Gilmore
Mikal Gilmore
Mikal Gilmore is an American writer. He was born "Michael Gilmore," but later changed the spelling of his name.-Life & career:Gilmore was born on February 9, 1951 in Portland, Oregon to Frank and Bessie Gilmore....
, Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...
, Robert Wagner
Robert Wagner
Robert John Wagner is an American actor of stage, screen, and television.A veteran of many films in the 1950s and 1960s, Wagner gained prominence in three American television series that spanned three decades: It Takes a Thief , Switch , and Hart to Hart...
, and Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and...
.
A second Book Soup store at South Coast Plaza
South Coast Plaza
South Coast Plaza is an upscale-luxury shopping center in Costa Mesa, California, USA, in Orange County. The largest mall in California, its sales of over 1.5 billion are highest in the United States...
in Costa Mesa, California
Costa Mesa, California
Costa Mesa is a city in Orange County, California. The population was 109,960 at the 2010 census. Since its incorporation in 1953, the city has grown from a semi-rural farming community of 16,840 to a primarily suburban and "edge" city with an economy based on retail, commerce, and light...
, opened in 2002 but closed in 2007 due to high rent and the impact of competition from Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
and large discount chain stores such as Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. , branded as Walmart since 2008 and Wal-Mart before then, is an American public multinational corporation that runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. The company is the world's 18th largest public corporation, according to the Forbes Global 2000...
and Target
Target Corporation
Target Corporation, doing business as Target, is an American retailing company headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is the second-largest discount retailer in the United States, behind Walmart. The company is ranked at number 33 on the Fortune 500 and is a component of the Standard & Poor's...
.
Goldman announced he was selling Book Soup on January 2, 2009, then died of pancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer refers to a malignant neoplasm of the pancreas. The most common type of pancreatic cancer, accounting for 95% of these tumors is adenocarcinoma, which arises within the exocrine component of the pancreas. A minority arises from the islet cells and is classified as a...
on January 3, 2009. Vroman's Bookstore
Vroman's Bookstore
Vroman's Bookstore is the oldest and largest independent bookstore in Southern California.- Founding and early history :Founded in 1894 by Adam Clark Vroman, the original Vroman’s Book and Photographic Supply store was located at 60 E. Colorado St in Pasadena, California. A.C...
and Book Soup signed an agreement October 9, 2009, to purchase Book Soup.
Publicity stunts
Book Soup hosts author readings on an almost daily basis. The store is well-known for its many publicity stunts, some staged by authors and some staged by the store to attract customers. Among the more notorious are:- For a book reading by Paris HiltonParis HiltonParis Whitney Hilton is an American businesswoman, heiress, and socialite. She is a great-granddaughter of Conrad Hilton . Hilton is known for her controversial participation in a sex tape in 2003, and appearance on the television series The Simple Life alongside fellow socialite and childhood...
, Hilton's publicist hired protesters to picket the store with signs saying, "Read a book, don't write one." - After Margaret ThatcherMargaret ThatcherMargaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
banned Peter WrightPeter WrightPeter Maurice Wright was an English scientist and former MI5 counterintelligence officer, noted for writing the controversial book Spycatcher, which became an international bestseller with sales of over two million copies...
's nonfiction exposé, Spy Catcher, Book Soup ran an ad in Private EyePrivate EyePrivate Eye is a fortnightly British satirical and current affairs magazine, edited by Ian Hislop.Since its first publication in 1961, Private Eye has been a prominent critic and lampooner of public figures and entities that it deemed guilty of any of the sins of incompetence, inefficiency,...
magazine which declared "Banned in Britain. Available in America." The store sold 3,000 copies of the book in the next three weeks. - When a fatwa was issuedThe Satanic Verses controversyThe Satanic Verses controversy was the heated and sometimes violent Muslim reaction to the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. Many Muslims accused Rushdie of blasphemy or unbelief and in 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie...
condemning Salman Rushdie's The Satanic VersesThe Satanic VersesThe Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, first published in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Prophet Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters...
, Goldman wrote a ransom note to the Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles TimesThe Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
declaring that freedom of speechFreedom of speechFreedom of speech is the freedom to speak freely without censorship. The term freedom of expression is sometimes used synonymously, but includes any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used...
was being held hostage. Rupert MurdochRupert MurdochKeith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG is an Australian-American business magnate. He is the founder and Chairman and CEO of , the world's second-largest media conglomerate....
wrote Goldman a letter praising his "ransom note." - When the National Organization of Women (NOW) strongly criticized Bret Easton EllisBret Easton EllisBret Easton Ellis is an American novelist and short story writer. His works have been translated into 27 different languages. He was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney...
's 1991 novel, American PsychoAmerican PsychoAmerican Psycho is a psychological thriller and satirical novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story is told in the first person by the protagonist, serial killer and Manhattan businessman Patrick Bateman. The book's graphic violence and sexual content generated a great deal of...
, for glamorizing and condoning rapeRapeRape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
, Book Soup put fliers into its copies of the novel, blasting NOW for drawing attention to the book and disclaiming any approval of the novel's content. The store sold 18 copies of the book in 24 hours.
External links
- Book Soup Web site
- Interview with Book Soup publicity director Tyson Cornell at Publishers WeeklyPublishers WeeklyPublishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...