We'll miss those dusty shelves

LONG BEACH, CALIF. -- If Ray Bradbury is right, and books are people, then this huge brick building on Long Beach Boulevard is very crowded.

They're shy people, to be sure, these souls who inhabit Acres of Books. They don't come up to you and talk. They wait to be noticed, to be picked up, dusted off. Judging by the amount of dust, some of them have been here a very long time.

Just when you think you've met them all, you discover a small doorway in the back that leads to another room, full of more people, more stories.

But not for long. Everything but the historically protected facade of Acres of Books is set to meet the wrecking ball in about a year's time. The lot will soon be home to condos, or shops. To progress, the way the typewriter store across the street turned to computers before it, too, closed.

The books inside, the people waiting to talk about everything from oceanography to politics, to mysteries still unsolved, their fate is less certain. Maybe some of them will live on, in another shrine like this. Maybe not.

On a recent trip to Southern California for a festival celebrating books, depression was the mood of the day. In addition to the venerable Acres of Books -- a haunt that actually attracted the likes of Bradbury back in the day -- the famous Dutton's Brentwood store was closing, too, selling off its inhabitants at cut-rate prices as drivers on San Vincente Boulevard crawled by outside.

Yet another store, rumored to be on Hollywood Boulevard, had vanished. An employee of a business next door said he thought there may have been a bookstore there, a couple years ago.

It's not like Las Vegas hasn't seen this, either. CityLife first reported in January that The Reading Room -- a home for brand-new books located in the unlikeliest of spots, the Mandalay Place mall -- was going to close. (No date has been set.) And Native Son, a bookstore and gathering spot for the West Las Vegas community, closed last week.

Books packed in boxes, their stories untold, not even to gather dust on shelves anymore.

It was a love of books and an outrage at reports of postwar Soviet book burning that drove Bradbury into the Powell Library on the campus of UCLA for nine blazing days in the early 1950s at a typewriter he rented for 10 cents per half-hour, later to emerge with the first version of the book we know as Fahrenheit 451. That book showed us a world where books really were people, passages reposed in memory, beyond the censor's flame. Bradbury wrote it at a time where dissent could really cost you something -- your very livelihood. Having your patriotism challenged by a scoundrel today seems petty scorn by comparison.

History marches on: Typewriters gave way to computers, which gave way to laptops. Encyclopedias gave way to the Internet. The gas station pay phone Bradbury used as his office line has been replaced with cell phone in almost everybody's pocket. (Oh, and now, you can get to the Internet on that phone, too, and take pictures and write e-mails and....)

Perhaps it shouldn't be as sad to see a bookstore close. It shouldn't evoke sorrow for all the hundreds and thousands of authors who toiled, like Bradbury at those rented typewriters in the Powell Library, over their own grand stories. Amazon.com is still around, right? Books are still being written, aren't they? We may read on computer screens and Kindles, but we're still reading, right?

But it is sad, like a death in the family, one you knew was coming for a long time but that still surprises you when it finally happens.

There's a difference, after all, between scrolling down an Amazon screen to place an order and wandering through the stacks of a really good used bookstore. There's a difference between finding something under the "customers also bought" heading and stumbling upon a side room you didn't even know was there, and finding a treasure you didn't even know existed on a dusty shelf.

The new way might be more efficient, but it's not the same thing. And it's not better, that's for damn sure.

The world is not going to stop spinning when the bricks of Acres of Books are torn down and carted away, its inhabitants scattered to the four winds. But the world won't be the same place it was before, and somehow, we're all the worse for it.

Steve Sebelius is editor of CityLife and the author of the daily blog "Various Things and Stuff," available at www.lvcitylife.com. He can be reached at 871-6780, ext. 306 or Ssebelius@lvcitylife.com.