San Diego Reader

I asked Dennis Wills, proprietor of D.G. Wills Books in La Jolla, how he came to be a bookseller. “That’s a very long story,” he said. “It involves espionage, intrigue, years working for the National Security Agency and for Zbigniew Brzezinski — right before he became Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser — encounters in Europe with great bookstores like Blackwell’s in London, and, especially, two books that made a deep impression on me, Somerset Maugham’s Razor’s Edge and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. It also involves my father’s illness that brought me back to Southern California after all those years away. Where should I start?”

“How about at the beginning,” I said.

Dennis has been selling books in La Jolla for 20 years, first in a tiny, narrow converted office space on La Jolla Boulevard, and later in his present location on Girard Avenue. He collects photos of authors with books in their hands, statues and figurines of people reading books, book presses, and all sorts of other paraphernalia associated with books. There are several paintings and photographs in the store based on a famous painting called The Bookworm by the 19th-century German genre painter Carl Spitzweg, which shows an elderly man, apparently a scholar, on a ladder in front of a row of bookshelves with a book under each arm, one tucked between his knees, and yet another open in his hands. This is a man who can’t get enough of book knowledge, and he seems emblematic of Dennis himself.

When I suggested to Dennis that he consider developing a website or at least catalog his rare and valuable books for one of the many used-book sites on the Internet, he looked at me as if I had gone loony. “You know,” he said, “someone walked in once and asked if we had our inventory online. ‘No,’ I told him, ‘our books are on the shelves. We walk over to the shelf and look.’ Imagine that!”

One of Dennis’s colleagues, Chuck Valverde of Wahrenbrock’s Book House, at 726 Broadway, San Diego’s oldest bookstore, recently underscored the feeling many independent booksellers have today. He likened book dealers to dirigible pilots or carriage makers. Some dirigible pilots learned to fly airplanes, and some buggy makers started manufacturing automobile chassis; others went out of business. Dennis shows no sign of adapting to the new technological realities of bookselling, but his bookstore remains a gathering place for the literati and a must destination for serious book lovers throughout Southern California. As I looked around the splendidly disarrayed yet orderly chaos of his one-of-a-kind La Jolla institution, I felt like I was in the middle of an archeological dig.

Nearly every square foot of space in the store is used. Yet Dennis still manages to host regular literary readings — aisles crammed with folding chairs, usually spilling out into the street — where speakers carry the word to faithful attendees. There is bric-a-brac everywhere: small Chinese sculptures, hand-carved busts, tribal ceremonial masks, a Laurel and Hardy poster, baseball caps, and, tacked all over, photos and letters and yellowed, curled newspaper clippings. Next to the arm of a worn-out easy chair, a pile of six or seven thick dictionaries proclaims the prominence of words in this place. Over the archway that connects one part of the store with another hangs a huge two-man crosscut saw, symbolic, I think, of the trees sacrificed to produce the books Dennis has sold. As if to emphasize this symbol, next to the counter is a circular, five-foot-long shellacked hardwood slab that has served as a podium for authors at his Friday- and Saturday-night readings. Among the writers who have stood at that podium are Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Yevgeny Yevtushenko (three times), and Nobel Laureates Francis Crick and Derek Walcott.

Dennis talks about writers with reverence, and he obviously feels honored to have had these literary figures read and sign books in his store. I asked him why he held them in such esteem. “Because it’s knowledge,” he said. “We’re surrounded here by knowledge. To whatever extent members of our species are capable of understanding our failures or our potential is through knowledge. Our brains are capable of creating the symphonies of Beethoven or Brahms, or works of art that will excite us like those of Picasso or Michelangelo or Da Vinci, or words, stirring words that stimulate our thoughts and carry forth ideas about justice or freedom or individuality, as in the works of Thoreau, or Emerson, or Plato. And then there are characters in novels, plays, and short stories that give these ideas flesh and bones. While Hegel or Kant write very difficult books that only a handful of philosophers are going to fully understand, a character in a Tolstoy short story contemplating good and evil can speak to many more people who do not have serious, rigorous philosophical training.” As I listened to Dennis talk about books, philosophy, art, music, and religion, surrounded by his tens of thousands of books, I nearly became convinced that hordes of people are rummaging through The Death of Ivan Illych, hungry for ideas, instead of staring at Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on TV. For him, books have a transformative power, and they certainly have transformed his life.

“I wasn’t always interested in books,” he told me. “Especially as a young man. I was born in Los Angeles in 1946. My parents came out from Nebraska during the Depression to Los Angeles, and I was their only child. My dad went to medical school in the Los Angeles area, and my mother worked at Newberry’s department store. My parents, I guess, were Presbyterian. We didn’t go to church that much because my dad was mainly at the hospital on Sunday mornings, and he was interested in sports medicine and sports in general. He ran track and was a pole-vaulter back in Nebraska, and so on Sunday we were never churchgoers in a formal sense.

“I went to California Military Academy for seven years and had a pretty good education there, I guess. Small classes. I lived at home. I did not board. And I went to Lutheran High School, which was then in Inglewood. I played football, in great part because my dad had played football, so I became very interested in sports. I loved football and particularly the Rams.” At the mention of the Rams, Dennis became more animated and lively. His face brightened. “After all these years, they finally won the Super Bowl even though they are in St. Louis. There are a lot of us from Los Angeles who fantasize and have the delusion that the Rams are still in L.A., and naturally we were excited about this year’s Super Bowl.

“After I got out of high school, my parents divorced, like many parents after 25 or 26 years of marriage. My father moved to Redondo Beach. My mother and I had stayed in the house we had lived in as a family after the divorce. But when the house was sold, she moved to West Covina and became a schoolteacher again. She had taught in Nebraska early in the ’30s, I think. So I moved in with my dad and his second wife. I went to L.A. Valley College for a semester and to El Camino Junior College for a few semesters. Then I quit El Camino and started working. I can’t remember quite the circumstances. Maybe I wasn’t quite ready to transfer — I was still working on my first hot rod. I had motorcycles, a few motorcycles, and somehow I got interested in Model A Fords. And so I had one hot rod while I was in high school, when we lived in Baldwin Hills. I was building a new Model A Ford, and maybe I — I think I dropped out, had to work on the hot rod and go to work for a while. Hot rods and sports, that’s what I was most interested in.”

Dennis looks more like an auto mechanic than a bookseller. The flattened, oily, nondescript baseball cap he nearly always wears seems to match his frayed khaki shirts, his stained and unkempt jeans, his heavily worn brown walking shoes with tears between the sole and tops. These details combine to produce the image of a man who is, let’s say, casual about his appearance. His friends and employees kid him about being so “fashion” conscious. His graying goatee and dark-rimmed Clark Kent glasses are the only professorial touches about him, and even they blend into his artfully careless sartorial ensemble.

Lots of things in the bookstore reflect his early interests. One of the first things you notice when you walk in is several huge pulleys and hooks suspended across wooden beams near the ceiling. “I think the pulleys are a reflection of those hot rod days,” he said, “and I think even though we have a bookstore, I still think it’s a garage where I’m working on the Model A Ford, and, I don’t know, I just picked them up. I acquired them here and there. I like to have heavy iron things around because it probably reminds me of that garage or something, and we’re working on the hot rod. I’ve got pictures hanging up over the front door of the hot rod — the Model A Ford. I still have it, of course. It’s parked in the ‘Bat Cave,’ a few blocks from here. My friend John Hughes came up with the Bat Cave name because the Model A Ford lives there and there’s an automatic garage door. The Model A is black and it looks sort of like the Batmobile. I also have most of my private library over there, mainly some works of philosophy that I used in Oxford and some works in Soviet studies from my Columbia days. Some works inscribed to me from Brzezinski and other professors of mine. Some books inscribed to me from people who have read here — Mailer, Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, Françoise Gilot, Oliver Stone, etc. I keep them together on a shelf. I don’t look at them that much, but from time to time if there’s something I want to review I’ll pull it down. Books in my own library consist of books that I’ve been wanting to read that I haven’t gotten around to yet and people whose style I respect, like Sir Isaiah Berlin.

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