The Last of The Independents — A Personal Reflection of Cody’s Bookstore
An abandoned store stands on the corner of Telegraph and Haste, its glass edifice plastered with black posters. The fact that it is abandoned is not so unusual, given that most of downtown Berkeley, a victim of a post-COVID economy, has now been shuttered. But this store, in particular, has stood mostly empty for nearly twenty years (mostly, except for a brief two-year interval when the property reopened as the Mad Monk, Center for Anachronistic Media, before closing unceremoniously in 2018).
A remnant from a distant era, it silently watches the local chess players who sit at tables now occupying the space in front of it or the students hurrying past in groups, their eyes glued to their mobiles without so much as a second glance.
Amongst the Dehli restaurants, pizzerias, and thrift shops lining the Ave, as it is affectionately known by locals, it would hard-press anyone to think that a thriving cultural landmark once stood in its place for over half a century or that this cultural landmark housed one of the true independent bookstores in America. Certainly not those oblivious students, many of whom were toddlers when the store closed for good nearly two decades ago. But Cody’s Books was once a bastion of literary life in Berkeley, as well as its social and political heart and soul.
Cody’s became a mainstay in my life in the 1990s just as big chain booksellers like Barnes & Noble began dominating the scene. I was in my late twenties, working from one dead-end job to the next and struggling to get my writing career off the ground (in fact, I found it shortly after walking up to the Ave. for a job interview). During the weekends, I’d take the train up to Berkeley and walk to the flagship store which was a few blocks from the UC campus, and for a few hours read the magazines in the nook overlooking the Ave.
Though the store was often busy, I never felt pressured or in a rush to make purchases. Unlike the big chains, Cody’s was designed to tempt readers, to build a sense of community. The entire layout of the store was perfect: natural light from its large front windows, the tightly packed pinewood shelves, background noise that seemed strangely and comfortingly modulated, and small nooks and spaces that one could disappear into with a book or magazine on one’s lap. All of it designed for readers looking for an escape into a world of books.
It was there, amongst all those books, that I was inspired to write a poem. It wasn’t very good, I’ll admit, and, quite frankly, I can’t recall what it was about. But I recall the moment when the rush of inspiration overtook me while sitting on a wooden bench in the narrow aisle of the fiction section where the anthologies were shelved, grabbing an empty envelope out of my purse and jotting down lines. Whenever I went to Cody’s, my brain burned with ideas, as though all those writers were speaking directly to me, telling me I must join them, that I was a member of the tribe.
There could have been other stores. The Bay Area certainly had its share. Two doors away from Cody’s stands Moe’s Bookstore, which, like Cody’s, has a long and storied history (you can briefly spot it in the background in the 1967 movie The Graduate).
At the end of the block across the street is Shakespeare & Co., a quiet, dark, hobbit of a hole selling used and antiquarian books on tightly enclosed shelves that preen toward the high ceiling. Downtown there’s Pegasus on Shattuck and Durant and once, across the street, a Barnes & Noble (now since gone).
On several occasions I went to Marcus Books, both stores in Oakland and San Francisco, one of the rare African American booksellers in the area (Marcus in San Francisco is gone), and once at City Lights, a hoary and legendary relic where amongst its tight-spaced shelves and creaking wooden floorboards I imagined running into the now deceased owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, hoping that for one brief moment our paths aligned, history and present colliding into one another.
There was the ever-reliable Stacey’s Bookstore down on Market (opened in 1923 and closed in 2009), Alexander Book Co. on 2nd (closed), a few blocks down the fourth-floor book section in Virgin’s Megastore, and a Borders in Union Square, ghosts of another time, another city.
But many of these stores were often out of the way and being without a car I was reduced to location, convenience, and, well, money. By BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, our EL train system) downtown Berkeley is only nine minutes away, Shattuck and Durant, and Telegraph Ave. all within walking distance.
Cody’s became the center of these visits, but by the spring of 2002, I started taking classes at Berkeley City College, and between classes and work I didn’t have the time. A few years later, the store was gone, a victim of changing times and circumstances. It closed finally in 2008 after changing ownership and locations, struggling to survive in a new economy that had little space or sympathy for independents.
When I heard that Cody’s was closing, I admit I felt a twinge of guilt, as if my abandoning the store left it vulnerable to the cruel, heartless predatory instincts of late-stage capitalism. But Cody’s was a business, a fact I learned when I briefly worked at bookstores (including Cody’s during the Christmas season) while in school. If it was a victim, it was a victim of the shifting tides of bookselling markets. But I still can’t help but wonder: Was I the one with the smoking gun in her hands? Did I kill Cody’s?
Like City Lights in San Francisco, Cody’s Books emerged in the Bay Area when America was under transformation. The US had emerged undefeated from two wars and had become a political, economic, and cultural juggernaut that, under the guise of the Cold War, ruled as fiat, with atomic weapons as the chief means of global dominance.
The brief taste of freedom black people and/or women experienced during the war as defense plants opened up job opportunities where none existed previously, was swiftly and cruelly revoked once the war ended and veterans returned home, physically, emotionally, and psychologically scarred. While the air sniffed of change, America tightened its racial, gender, and sexual constraints even tighter, forcing a false reflection of itself as white nuclear families and suburban homes with white picket fences became the social “norm.”
Eventually, the cultural and political movements that defined the 1960s would peel away some of those illusions (or more likely reveal them in the open), but before any of that occurred, the publishing industry had quietly undergone its own transformation, one that would in part and indirectly set the spark for the ensuing cultural change. Unexpectedly, that revolution would come in the form of paperback books. In short, the arrival of trade paperback publishers like Penguin and Pocketbooks in the 1930s opened the market to non-students and working-class readers who could now afford the cheap and easily accessible books.
By the 1950s, the average paperback could run from fifty cents to a dollar, covered a wide variety of topics and genres — from scholarly reissues or out-of-print books to pulp fiction — that were often overlooked by mainstream book publishers, and were sold nontraditionally in grocery stores, drug stores, or bus depots where a general readership would most likely access them (I recall my early reading years when my Mom would purchase paperbacks for me during her weekly grocery shopping).
University presses began reprinting classic, scholarly, and/or out-of-print works in paperback, making them even more affordable to college students. Students, radicals, and dime store philosophers alike could now read the works of Marcuse, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud and expound on their theories on street corners or in coffee shops. Young people would eventually be radicalized by these books, but, outside of academia, many of them had to find other avenues to track them down. The only thing missing in this revolution were bookstores that sold these new specialty items. Enter stage left: City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, Cody’s in Berkeley.
Fred and Pat Cody dropped in on this scene in 1955 in search of a place where they could freely express their leftist idealism. Both were activists who, after one near-encounter with the FBI, fled to Mexico City where Fred enrolled at the Universidad de Mexico. They lived the charmed lives of ex-pats, engaged in the intellectual milieu of the university, attending dinner parties where such luminaries as Frieda Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Pablo Neruda held court. By the mid-fifties, they resettled in California, first in Palo Alto and then in Berkeley, where, with a $5,000 investment, they founded Cody’s.
The store was a little place no bigger than a “living room” north of the UC campus on Euclid Avenue. They didn’t make a profit, but then again profit-making was never the point. The store moved again to Telegraph and Dwight before the building on Telegraph and Hearst was built, a gleaming cathedral dedicated to trade paperbacks. Pat, who had a degree in economics, managed the store and Fred, being its leading intellectual, was the buyer and meeter of publishing reps. As a buyer, his tastes reflected his radical politics.
The store’s pinewood shelves were stocked with scholarly texts that wouldn’t be shelved within a hair’s breadth of major booksellers. These books would eventually stoke the intellectual fire of young radicals. The store became a temple for UC students, Fred its shaman. Joan Baez was one of his disciples. Activist Mario Savio, who would become the face and voice of the Free Speech Movement, worked there for six months. Cody’s anticipated the sixties.
Cody’s was right in the middle of it all when that first match was lit. It happened in 1969 when students took control over a small piece of property owned by the UC system and renamed it People’s Park. When the local police were called in to remove the students, a riot erupted. Then Governor Ronald Reagan deployed the National Guard to deal with the protesters. The protests spilled onto Telegraph Avenue where the Guard lobbed tear gas canisters into the crowd and began beating protesters back with nightsticks. Protesters lifted the wounded out of the street and carried them into Cody’s, where the staff administered first-aid care.
Cody’s became a safe house, which of course attracted attention from the guardsmen, who tossed a teargas canister into the store. One of the staff tossed it back out, only to be tossed back in again and fill the store with gas, forcing people back out into the chaotic street. For months afterward, anyone could crack open one of the books on the shelves and still smell the noxious fumes in the pages. For Berkeley residents, Cody’s became a symbol, an institution of radical politics, and intellectualism, as well as the spirit of a town and its people.
By the 1980s, Reagan became president, heralding America’s full swing rightward. But despite the change in political tenor, Cody’s remained committed to protecting the leftist intellectual spirit it fostered. In 1989, the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on novelist Salman Rushdie after publishing his controversial novel The Satanic Verses. Many large chain booksellers took copies off their shelves for fear of picket lines or worse, but Cody’s refused to bow down to pressure and courted controversy by placing Rushdie’s novel in the front window. Their act of defiance proved that the large chain sellers had reasons to be intimidated by the noxious atmosphere.
Not long after Cody’s showcased the novel, a pipe bomb was thrown through its window. It failed to detonate, but its message rang clearly. That long-ago event rings with a frightening prescience following the recent assassination attempt on the novelist’s life. Rushdie survived the attack but lost an eye. Yet the assault on his life only revealed how little had changed in the thirty years since the publication of his novel.
The attack on Cody’s would have shaken anyone’s resolve, yet when then-owner Andy Ross asked the staff whether they should pull the book from the shelves, the staff overwhelmingly voted to keep it where it was. Like so many independent booksellers, Cody’s drew a line in the sand to protect books, free speech, and the marketplace of ideas. It proved that a small business could play an integral role in the community, one predicated not on commercialization but on the creation of a citizenry.
In building a community of ideas, Cody’s also built a community for writers. Since its early years, it offered a space for writers to read their works and stimulate a fellowship with readers. C.P. Snow, Allen Ginsberg, and Anais Nin read their works at the store. Other writers, such as Rushdie, Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Gary Snyder, Susan Sontag, and President Bill Clinton, held readings there as well.
By the 1970s, both Fred and Pat wanted out of the bookselling business, so in 1977 they sold Cody’s to Ross, a bookseller from northern California. It says a lot about how significant Cody’s was to the community that people warned Ross not to change the store. He didn’t listen, at least not entirely. He added 15,000 square feet to its location, enlarged its computer and mathematics section (becoming the largest to date for an indie bookseller) and, in 1997, opened a second store on Fourth Street.
The store became more beloved and popular in the years since, and Ross would be at the pinnacle when Cody’s became mired in the international controversy following The Satanic Verses’ publication.
I began frequenting the store a decade later, drawn to its reader-friendly atmosphere, long after street demonstrations morphed into IPOs and the dot.com boom. A computer, or the Internet for that matter, was out of the question for me, though its language had found its way into my daily conversations: the World Wide Web; Information Superhighway; floppy disks; downloads, uploads, and streaming. I was still fairly a Luddite, though my lack of complete submersion had more to do with money than ideology.
But that would all change in only a matter of years.
By the nineties, Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon had seen the future and declared it was on the Web, becoming one of the first booksellers to sell and trade books online. Amazon followed with an even more successful model, though it did not seem that way when the online behemoth first emerged online in 1994.
According to a Los Angeles Times article, the Seattle-based online retailer, which sold only books during its early iteration, had made over a billion dollars in sales by the early oughts but was still struggling to make a profit. However the world was changing, and soon online sellers would become the primary way in which books got into readers’ hands.
According to online books statistics, online bookselling is a huge business, dominating more than three-quarters of book sales in 2020, a jump from 32.2% in 2011 to 71%. Ebooks, which readers can experience on their phones and reader pads, have also become big sellers, with over 191 million e-books sold in the United States in 2020 according to statista.com. E-books have also made it comparatively easier for writers to get published with sites like Amazon, Lulu.com, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, and others offering writers a way to get beyond the literary gatekeepers of the book publishing world to see their books in print. This has also saturated the market.
The online site wordsrated.com estimates that of the four million new titles that are released each year, 1.7 million are self-published, and that doesn’t take into account the number of titles that are now being written through AI programs, which has, if submission sites to online journals are now sounding the alarm, have become a problem. In its pursuit of the future, technology has dumped traditions along the road like so much detritus. But in pursuit of change, we have lost something.
But before the nineties gave way to the millennium, there was still the possibility of what bookstores could provide for their customers — a place, not a virtual place but a real, physical space where people could find, read, buy, and talk about books.
For me, it was a place where I could be surrounded by the actual physicality of books, soak them in, and be inspired by them. Bookstores still seemed magical to me, as though they operated purely on air and a passion for literature. It never occurred to me then that a bookstore was as concerned about profit margins as any other business. It never occurred to me that when people stop patronizing a bookstore, that bookstore goes out of business.
I’m only flattering myself, making myself seem more innocent than I was. The truth is I’d known enough about the business side of bookselling to halfheartedly make a stab at avoiding big chains because of their predatory practices. Barnes & Noble, Borders, Crown Books — I’d read the stories about how they were pushing smaller independents out of business, offering discount books only they could finagle from the publishing industry.
I thought it was unfair then and made the effort to boycott the chains. But I was weak, a cheater. Occasionally I’d slip into the Barnes & Noble on Durant to buy a magazine or a book, sneaking my treats with me outside the store as though pulling my hand out of the cookie jar.
The truth is, I fell out of patronizing Cody’s for random, arbitrary reasons, and soon, like a lot of book buyers, I began book purchasing online, where I could find cheaper deals.
The 2008 documentary Paperback Dreams, which follows the struggles of both Cody’s and Kepler’s Books to stay relevant in an ever-changing marketplace, recorded the last day of the flagship store. Ironically, that fell on its fiftieth anniversary, so Ross held it open for just one more day to mark the occasion. There was a party, wine, and cake; Ross and Pat Cody (Fred died in the early 1980s) blew out the candles. The next day the store held a going-out-of-business sale. Customers, some former or perhaps not, showed up, bought books, and offered their condolences and appreciation. In a moment of candor, a teary-eyed Ross remarked that if customers had shopped there regularly then he wouldn’t have had to shut Cody’s in the first place.
I didn’t go that last day. Although I was aware that the store was closing, I had no idea about the final date. It passed by without my knowledge. A year before, after attending community college in Berkeley, I transferred to San Francisco State University and spent the majority of my time commuting from my home in Richmond to the city, a total of over two hours back and forth. I found my little niche at the campus bookstore, where I’d loiter in-between classes, occasionally reading books or buying a few when I could afford to splurge.
A few months after the flagship store closed, it reopened in San Francisco on Stockton and Market, across the street from the Apple store, occupying a space that once belonged to Planet Hollywood. It was a big store, 20,000 square feet with a street-level entrance and a main floor below.
I had gone there only once. I happened to be downtown, walking up Market, when I noticed the banner with the store’s name jutting out from the building. I didn’t even know the store had opened in the city, so I was as surprised seeing it there as I would be seeing a long-lost friend on a crowded street. Forgive me for extending the analogy, but the truth is walking into that store was exactly like meeting that old friend and realizing how much she had changed. This store was too big, too light-saturated, too impersonal. It was also sadly nearly empty.
The store lasted just barely over a year.
The last time I saw Cody’s was in 2008 after the San Francisco store closed and the 4th Street store moved to Shattuck in Berkeley, across the corner from Walgreens. The small space it now occupied had a troubled history. Businesses opened and closed there with almost predictable regularity. One moment the space was occupied, and the next a realtor sign was pasted on the plate glass window (it has since found relative success housing a FedEx).
Businesses rely on location for their success. Cody’s survived on Telegraph for so long because it wasn’t far from the UC campus. Along with Moe’s and Shakespeare & Co. nearby, it had created its niche and a competitive spot in a local market that supported independent booksellers. Fifty-plus years later, Cody’s was struggling to find a new space where it could exist. The world had changed too much, and it was fighting to meet up with it, fighting to hang on.
I stepped into the store that day, but the thrill was already gone. The store was fairly busy with customers browsing tables or shelves. I browsed the store, of course, checking out the literature section, but it wasn’t the same. It was too impersonal, too intransigent. In the end, Cody’s had changed so much that it had lost its personality. I was looking for the Cody’s of Telegraph, the feeling I had when I walked into that store and lost myself in its tome-cluttered spaces. I was looking for a place that no longer existed.
After only a few minutes of browsing, I walked back out onto the street and continued up Shattuck amongst the bustling crowd, my memory of that old store, like everything else, slipping inexorably into the past.
Sources:
- Beckstead, Alex. Director and Producer, Paperback Dreams, 2008.
Cody, Anthony. “Pat Cody, Bookstore Owner, Pioneering Feminist Health Activist.” Berkeley Daily Planet. Oct. 1, 2010. - “Cody’s Books: An Historical Berkeley Landmark and Independent Bookstore Begins Archive at Bancroft Library,” Bene Legere, №53 Summer 1999.
- Ross, Andy. Ask the Agent: http://andyrossagency.wordpress.com/tag/fred-cody/
- Sarkar, Pia. “Cody’s Books to leave S.F.” SF Gate. April 6, 2007.
