The new LA Weekly has a terrific cover package on Southern California’s independent bookstores. Gendy Alimurung roams a handful of ‘gloriously idiosyncratic’ indies — Vroman’s, Skylight, Book Soup and Dutton’s, along with two relative newcomers, Family and Diesel — and introduces the idiosyncratic folks who run them.

Lotsa interesting tidbits, like this one:

Tyson Cornell is the events organizer and publicity guy for Book Soup, and in that capacity one evening before an author reading, he found himself in the shop’s tiny upstairs office area drinking Chivas Regal with Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro. Thompson, having also ingested a quantity of cocaine and getting surlier by the minute, vomited on Cornell’s shoe while, downstairs, some 500 people were waiting in a line that snaked around the block for the gonzo journalist to sign books. Which he eventually did. But only for a couple of minutes. Thompson, to Cornell’s chagrin, signed 80 copies, got annoyed, then took off down the street and disappeared. It was his last public signing; four months later, Thompson shot himself in the head.

This is the kind of thing that Cornell says “happens all the time” to varying degrees at the store on Sunset Boulevard, the kind of thing he tells his parents about at Thanksgiving dinner when he goes home to Minnesota. They roll their eyes, usually, and tell him to shut up.

“For a while, there was a death pool going in the store,” Cornell says.

You’ll want to keep reading Alimurung’s stories here.

Browse the Weekly’s list of ‘Our Fav Neighborhood Bookstores’ here.