John Evans and Alison Reid share a love of bookstores, but maybe not exactly the way most people do.
They own them.
“Alison likes to open stores and,” says Evans. “I hate the idea of communities that want a bookstore not to have one.”
“So it’s sort of a marriage made in hell is what it is,” Evans joked.
Evans spoke in May when one of their stores, Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood, had been on the market for several months. After 35 years and five different bookstores, Evans and Reid decided in August 2023 that it was time to find a new owner to take over what they had built and keep that legacy going.
And Diesel wasn’t the only Southern California independent bookstore confronting change in recent years.
Cellar Door Books in Riverside lost its lease in March 2023 before reopening in a new location. After its original location was no longer available, Bel Canto Books in Long Beach relocated earlier this year. The Book Rack in Arcadia closed in February after 40 years of selling used books. Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena launched an online fundraising campaign to help keep the store open.
Running an independent bookstore has never been easy, but in the post-pandemic Age of Amazon, it’s gotten even tougher.
With turmoil in the indie bookstore world, we started tracking changes underway at three independent bookstores in search of new owners: Diesel, where Evans and Reid were ready to leave the trade; Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, which also owns Book Soup in West Hollywood, where owner Joel Sheldon decided to step down; and Underdog Bookstore in Monrovia, where owners Thomas Murtland and Nathan Allen decided to leave their store after facing months of hate speech directed at the store for its championing of LGBTQ+ and minority books and authors.
Sheldon, whose family founded Vroman’s in 1894, declined to talk about his search for a new owner. John Evans of Diesel and Thomas Murtland of Underdog Bookstore in Monrovia did – as did the new owners their stores eventually found.
And Jessica Palacios, whose family saved Once Upon a Time Bookstore in Montrose from closing 21 years ago, added perspective on what it takes to keep an independent’s bookshelves stocked and doors open today.
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Selling Diesel, A Bookstore
In April 2023, Evans and Reid flew to Barcelona with friends to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play at the historic stadium where the 1992 Olympics were held.
“We didn’t talk about the stores at all,” he says of the trip. “But when we came back Alison said, ‘You know, I think I’m done doing this.’ I said, ‘Me, too.’ We just happened to arrive, as we often do, at the same decision at the same time.”
Their second store, Diesel in Del Mar, was already for sale when the couple went to Spain. The Brentwood store joined it on the market in August.
By May, Evans had interviewed 25 or 30 potential buyers, and been contacted by many more. But selling a bookstore, especially your own, isn’t like other transactions, given the stewardship owners like Evans and Reid felt for their bookstores.
“People say, ‘I love this store, I don’t know what it would be like if it wasn’t here,’” Evans says. “I’d be like, ‘Well, it doesn’t really have to be us.’ Some bookstore should be there. I don’t like it when bookstores close, but I don’t mind it when they change.”
Change is fine, but values were more important as Evans evaluated would-be buyers.
“People have to realize that it’s community-oriented, and this store, you’re also thinking of the customers,” he says. “The store is made up of the customers, the booksellers, the publishers, the authors. So what are these customers expecting?
“In Brentwood, they’re expecting a certain level of sophistication,” Evans says. “They used to have Dutton’s (which closed in 2008, the same year Diesel opened), which was an encyclopedically interesting store. Now they have a small store that’s much more highly selected, but as a result, is oddly easier to find great books in because it’s smaller.”
Evans says he would ask questions about how the book business worked. “One of the classic dangers of being a bookseller is not having business chops but lots of idealism,” he says.
He tried to assess such qualities as their people skills. “It’s sort of like interviewing a bookseller,” Evans says. “Are you a misanthrope? Then you should not work in a bookstore. You can love dogs and people, but if you love dogs more than people it might not be the best thing for you.”
The question of money was often easy to resolve.
“They either have it or they don’t have it,” he says. “I’d say that’s the least significant thing. The biggest thing is when they realize how complicated it is. I mean, it’s not rocket science, but it is more intricate than selling clothes. We have 10,000 items that change every day.
A clear-eyed sense of the income potential is also important.
“If they’re looking for something that’s going to give them a huge return on investment, that’s not a good idea,” Evans says. “A bookstore is a dumb place to do that. As Alison says, ‘It’s not a good living; it’s a good life.’ It doesn’t mean it’s endless suffering and woe. It just means you can’t make as much out of it, which is fine if that’s not what you care about.
“That’s a value statement. Like you don’t want to lose money, but how much money do you need it make?”
On August 1, Diesel’s new owner took over, though Reid and Evans weren’t quite done yet.
Underdog under threat
When Underdog Bookstore in Monrovia opened its doors in April 2023, owners Thomas Murtland and Nathan Allen were filled with hope for its future.
“When we created Underdog, we had a few main targets,” Murtland says. “The reason we chose (the name) Underdog was we wanted to have a place where we highlighted underdog stories. For us, that means local authors, small press, LGBTQ+ authors and stories. It means BIPOC authors and stories.
“Essentially trying to help people curate books that they might not find online due to the algorithm or maybe just somebody who didn’t want to do the curation and research,” he says.
“The thing was that we wanted to create a space that felt community-focused,” Murtland says. “And for us, that occurred in the way that we designed the physical store. We have tables that are there for people to sit down and visit or do homework or work or writing. We have a puzzle table. We have couches.
“And we do that not only because of the community focus, which was the primary reason, but we also realized that we could make our store more accessible to different types of people.”
However, almost from the start, Underdog found itself the target of homophobic and racist verbal attacks both in person and online. Earlier this year, Murtland and Allen decided the stress was more than they could bear and decided to sell or close the store by the end of June.
“Selling a bookstore can be very personal depending on how important the bookstore is to you personally,” Murtland says. “Most booksellers create a bookstore or have a bookstore idea that aligns with them and the bookstore they wish they could walk into as a customer.”
In May, Murtland said he was talking with a group of people interested in taking over Underdog, checking to see how their vision might match that of the store he and Allen had created.
“As we were looking at how the transition would work that really informed how we were going to participate in the handoff,” he says. “So if somebody did not really have the same vision as us we would have gone about the conversation differently.
“All this is hypothetical, but if someone wanted to do a different bookstore, maybe they wanted to like just horror or just mystery or just romance. If the vision was changing, it probably would have looked a lot more like, ‘Let’s transfer our lease to you’ or something like that.
“But the group that has come together and the person leading the group is interested in doing something similar. They want to continue supporting underdog authors and they want to continue being a space for our current community.
“When ownership changes, some things are going to change, but we wanted to know that when we pass the name Underdog onto somebody that people go in and get at least a similar experience,” Murtland says
When in July, a newly formed nonprofit took over Underdog, the transition from old to new was seamless.
For the community
Jane Humphrey had run Once Upon a Time Bookstore in Montrose for 37 years when in 2003 she decided to retire. When no one stepped forward to buy the shop, 9-year-old Jessica Palacios was so distraught she wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times expressing her sadness at the situation.
“I am sad because no one wants to buy the nice bookstore,” she wrote. “Where am I going to get my fifth Harry Potter book if there is no Once Upon a Time bookstore?”
Palacios’ mother Maureen found out about the letter when the newspaper called to verify Jessica’s age. Soon, the Palacios family decided to buy the store themselves. Today Maureen Palacios is its owner and Jessica Palacios is the manager who will eventually take over from her mom.
“It was always fun, a special thing that we did,” Jessica Palacios says of her childhood love for the store that Publishers Weekly has named the oldest children’s bookstore in the nation. “My sister and I would come here and it was just like you got to pick one book. It’s fun to see that continue on with other families now.
“We see them coming in and (the parents) will be like, ‘OK, you get to pick one book before we have to go and get dinner,’” she says. “It’s got that kind of community presence, and it helps build that idea that a new book is a special thing you can get all the time.”
Her family had no experience running a retail business, and in the years to come, there were bumps in the road, with the pandemic the greatest challenge it, like many businesses, ever faced. Still, Palacios says her family never regretted the decision.
“The motivation was truly for the community,” she says. “Like, the bookstore was calling to us in the sense that the community needed it. And my family was in the right place and time to be able to take that up, take that mantle on.
“That makes a difference, to have the community support,” Palacios says. “And we’ve had that support for years from generations of families who’ve known us. We currently have people working for us who’ve only known it under my family’s ownership. They don’t remember the previous owners because they weren’t even born yet.”
Palacios says that bond between a bookstore owner and its community of readers is cherished in the independent bookstore world.
“I think all the owners, like every owner who takes up that mantle, understand they have their own community, wherever they are,” she says. “Their support as well. It’s not just the (owners). The whole community is there around you.”
New chapter for Diesel
Living in West Los Angeles, Richard Turner became a regular at Diesel, A Bookstore after Dutton’s closed and Diesel opened. It was 10 minutes from his family’s home by car or bike, and its location at the Brentwood Country Mart satisfied most of his basic needs.
“For me, it was like coffee, ice cream, books – perfect,” he says, laughing. “It’s everything I need.”
When his wife Heather Turner saw a post on the Diesel website last fall that announced it was for sale, Turner started to think.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever had these conversations, but we’d have these conversation usually late in the evening: ‘Hey, if you weren’t doing what you’re doing, is there something you have a passion for?’ And mine was always I’d have a bookstore. Ideally, you’d have a cafe off one end of it and maybe a wine store off the other, because I like wine and coffee and books. Now you could spend all day there.”
He’d worked in marketing and advertising for 30 years and never really thought seriously about that dream. Now he did.
“When Diesel was up for sale, we kind of looked at each other like this is almost too good to be true,” Turner says. “They invited people to write a letter and describe why we would be good, which was smart, because it made me really think about not just how much I love bookstores, but what’s in my background that could be useful. How can I help? What would I change, what would I keep the same?”
Near the end of 2023, the Turners met with Evans and Reid to talk in person about a possible deal for the Brentwood store. (Evans says he and Reid have decided not to sell the Del Mar store until 2025 at the earliest.)
Time passed. At one point, when it looked the Diesel sale might not happen, Turner says he called Vroman’s and asked what they were looking for in a buyer.
“That’s when I realized it wasn’t just a bookstore at any cost in any location,” he says. “It was a bookstore in my community where the people that I know and spend time with go and hang out. The idea of being connected to the community in the store was really appealing to me.
“I just kept coming back to, ‘No, it’s this. This is the one,’” Turner says.
Eventually, the deal was done. Turner took over Diesel in Brentwood on Aug. 1. Evans and Reid agreed to stay on for a time to help him learn the ropes.
“I think the more time we spent together the more they understood how serious I was about it,” Turner says. “It wasn’t just a fancy and I wasn’t just excited. I understood that it was going to take real work and I wanted to learn every part of the business. I think the fact that I want to be in the store and work in the store rather than be just the owner was part of what gave them confidence.
“I’ve started to feel like I’m getting my legs under me a little bit,” he says two weeks into his ownership of the store. “I made the naive and foolish comment early on, ‘But it’s books, how hard could it be?’ There’s so much behind the scenes that is happening, so learning it is a lot of work.
“But the short answer is I’m completely in and I’m more enthusiastic. I love being in the store and talking with customers about books, and I’m willing to do all the things required to make sure that it’s well run.”
The Underdog wins
Kealie Mardell-Carrera discovered Underdog when it started as a pop-up at the Monrovia. When the store opened in April 2023, she was a regular. And when Murtland and Allen announced they were closing it if no one wanted to take over she stepped forward.
“I arranged to meet with Thomas for coffee and started that conversation a bit like: ‘I don’t know what I can offer yet, but I know that I want to help what needs to happen to keep this store open. Because I don’t want our community to lose this valuable space,’” Mardell-Carrera says.
Mardell-Carrera had worked mostly in education, doing intensive reading instruction with students with disabilities, she says. She also works with a local nonprofit called The Little Zoo, which brings animals to visit seniors, foster youth, and kids with disabilities. Her first job, when she was 16 and still living in her native England, was at a bookstore.
“Through following conversations I said, ‘The heart of Underdog is not about selling books for a profit, it is the community aspect and raising these underrepresented voices,’” Mardell-Carrera says. “So that was where the idea of Underdog as a non-profit was born.”
She created the nonprofit and recruited a board of directors with diverse skills and ties to the Monrovia community. Mardell-Carrera, who is now board president and director of Underdog, also went to work with Murtland to learn how the store worked.
“For me, it was that it was such a welcoming space,” Mardell-Carrera says of her motivation to save Underdog. “This opportunity to find books that made you feel represented and explore different parts of your identity. I was thinking I would have loved a space like this when I was young, and I need this space to continue for our local youth today who need to know that there is a safe and welcoming space for them.”
Mardell-Carrera says the nonprofit has made only a few changes. The store is open six days a week now instead of just weekends as it was under the latter part of Murtland and Allen’s ownership.
“We really expanded for last month, which was Disability Pride Month, and put a big focus on our neuro-diverse and disabled authors and stories,” she says. “That’s something close to my heart as a disabled person myself. But mostly we’re continuing to uplift those same voices.”
As a nonprofit, Underdog can use volunteers for events, accept donations and grants, and offer sponsorships for those who want to support the store.
“I was blown away by the amount of support that was out there and the amount of people that wanted to be involved and help make this new vision a reality,” Mardell-Carrera says. “If the store had closed, it would have felt like the haters had won.
“That’s not the message that I wanted young people to hear. I wanted our voices to be louder than the ones that were trying to push us out.”
