TUESDAY TRAVEL / TWO OF A KIND

Dennis Wills, La Jolla CA 

Comparing the iconic bookstores of Sylvia Beach and D.G. Wills 

By Thomas Shess

Some bookstores sell books. A rare few keep civilization from slipping off the table. 

Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris was one of those places. Dennis Wills’ D.G. Wills Books in La Jolla is another. 

They are not twins. 

 Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, Paris 

Paris had Joyce, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Pound, and the entire unruly tribe of expatriate modernism drifting in and out like unpaid weather. 

La Jolla has Girard Avenue, sea air, academics, aging poets, graduate students, book hunters, and browsers who enter for one title and emerge wiser  with three books they did not know they needed. 

But the kinship is unmistakable. 

Beach’s shop began as a lending library, literary post office, confessional, salon, publisher, and halfway house for difficult geniuses. Her greatest act of courage was publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses when more comfortable publishers would not touch it. She did not just stock literature. She midwifed it. 

Dennis Wills' bookstore carries that same endangered spirit on the West Coast. It is not designed by committee. It does not flatter the hurried customer. It asks you to slow down, look upward, bend sideways, read spines, follow hunches, and submit to accident. That is the old religion of bookstores: discovery by wandering. 

Independent bookstores of this kind are not efficient. Thank heaven. Efficiency is what gives us algorithms. Places like Beach’s Paris shop and Wills’ La Jolla shop give us serendipity, eccentricity, conversation, and the human being behind the counter who knows that the book you came in for may not be the book you need. 

That is why these two stores belong in the same sentence. One stood on the Left Bank and helped launch modern literature. The other stands in La Jolla and reminds San Diego that books are not decorative objects or delivery units. They are arguments, passports, provocations, and sometimes rescue boats. 

Sylvia Beach gave Joyce a harbor. 

Dennis Wills gives readers one. One of a kind? 

Yes. Two of a kind? Also yes. 

That is the contemporary miracle. 

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Anais Nin and current Shakespeare & Co. owner George Whitman, 1974

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 Claude Picasso and Francoise Gilot with Dennis Wills, La Jolla.

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The author of this blog is founder of PillartoPost.org Daily Online Magazine style blog and former Editor in Chief of San Francisco Magazine and Executive Editor with San Diego Magazine.