Frances Dinkelspiel attended a BEA preview of Paperback Dreams, a new documentary by Alex Beckstead about the struggles of Cody’s Books in Berkeley and Kepler’s Books in Menlo Parks. It made her cry.
She writes:
The film is quite good as it traces the history of these two iconic West Coast bookstores. It also establishes the importance of independents in the struggle for free speech. I had forgotten that the chain bookstores pulled Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses after Iran declared a fatwah against the writer. Andy Ross of Cody’s kept the book on the store’s shelves even after someone threw a Molotov cocktail inside the store. The Grateful Dead often played at Kepler’s in the 1960s, where they stole ashtrays and played the same songs over and over.
Read more here. Paperback Dreams airs on public television in November. Browse here.
Meet the authors of the California Authors Directory. Visit the directory to discover writers like Christina Meldrum, a Bay Area attorney whose book Madapple was just released this month. “In debut novelist Christina Meldrum's mesmerizing literary mystery, 
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