Over a long President's Day holiday weekend, I took advantage of the rainy, gloomy weather here in LA to visit a couple of the area's more well-known bookstores: Small World Books in Venice Beach and The Last Book Store in downtown's historic banking district. Both stores are well-stocked with plenty of titles to choose from, but Last Book Store is gigantic with a rare book and art room, a main floor of used fiction and an upstairs section of travel, history and philosophy known as the Labyrinth.
I bought two used books at Last Book Store - a paperback copy of Hitler Moves East 1941-1943 (1965) by Paul Carell. I remember this book because my father kept a copy of it for years on the top of toilet tank in the family bathroom. I have been reading more military history and lately have become nostalgic about the books my father read.
I also picked up a replacement paperback copy of the Bantam edition of Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963). This makes sense. Pynchon readers such as myself cannot travel in SoCal without thinking of the settings of his better books: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and more recently Inherent Vice (2010). It is from The Crying of Lot 49 that I came up with the name from my publishing LLC -- Muted Horn Communications.
Ironically, the rains ended before leaving Venice Beach and Small World Books (note the red and white roof). No rainbow, but...
