You needed to be tough to keep going back there with as little available funds as I had then, but I loved that place and so I did. It's interior was spartan and unruly, and owner Steve Edrington was notably cranky and sarcastic.
Bond Street had not as comprehensive a selection of comics, but did possess a magnificent array of back issues of every science fiction magazine imaginable - including my favorites at the time, Galaxy, Analog, and the occasional New Worlds. I met any number of like-minded proto-nerds there - many of whom later went on to have jobs in the comics industry.Ī couple blocks away, just south of the Boulevard on Wilcox, was Bond Street Books. Bert was young-ish and hip, and I was pretty sure he indulged in at least modest drug use when he wasn't haggling with his youthful clientele of buyers and sellers. Unlike the Village Rexall Drugs which only stocked that month's titles, Cherokee dealt in out of date back issues going back to the Golden Age, which were of course what I really coveted. In their own separate ways, Cherokee and Bond Street were for me that introduction.īert Blum was the younger brother of Cherokee's owner Gene who ran a separate comics shop upstairs - one of the very first in the city.
I had grown up doing stockwork over the Summers at Campbell's bookstore in Westwood Village which served much of the UCLA community, but had not yet really been exposed to the whole used bookstore experience. On Saturdays in the mid to late sixties, pre-teen science fiction and comic book enthusiast me would hop the RTD bus from West LA to comb the unadorned wooden shelves and cardboard boxes of Hollywood Boulevard's Cherokee Book Shop and Bond Street Books.
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