If people on Instagram can post guides to bookstores in Rome and Paris, then Los Gatos should have its due.
When I stood in the back corner at Beyond Text Bookstore, a killer little indie shop in the heart of Los Gatos, the idea came to me. A streetlamp was painted on the wall, right next to a tiny alcove. It became my guiding light for the rest of the day.
Beyond Text was not a huge place, but the proprietor was doing a fantastic job at helping other people, providing recommendations and the like. She carried a small but highly curated selection of stuff. All of which is exactly what made an indie bookstore special. I vowed to return.
Inspired by the streetlamp painted on the wall, I devised my own bookstore tour of the surrounding neighborhood. The best trips often sent one back home a different person than the one who left, and that was surely about to unfold. I realized Los Gatos was actually an interesting place to prowl for books. I never even thought about it that way. There was a new bookstore, a used bookstore just off the library and even a thrift store with its own small mishmash of second-hand stuff. It wasn’t Rome, but I found some gems.
Once out on the sidewalk, I ignored the women with $500-dollar hairdos walking their poodles. I passed on $2500 couches. I didn’t visit the squash club.
In my head, I resurrected the historical Los Gatos, this amazing place just off the cold green shadows of the Santa Cruz Hills. This was the town where Steve Wozniak had three phone numbers in 1982. Where my dad bought me a Commodore Vic-20 about 45 years ago. Where mobsters once owned car dealerships and ghosts of biker bars now haunted the hideous condos on Los Gatos Boulevard. My Gatos.
Then came the books. Inside the Friends Bookstore near the library, I was immediately reminded of those classic travel writers that stumbled into a bookstore and plucked something off the shelves that serendipitously helped fill space for the rest of the trip. Lawrence Durrell in Trieste, for example, before he headed to Cyprus in Bitter Lemons.
The Friends Bookstore was a goldmine. For a whopping two bucks, I found a first edition hardback copy of Pico Iyer’s 1988 anthology, Video Night in Kathmandu, one of the first works of travel writing I ever read. It was in the wrong section, the fiction area, which is probably why no one had snagged it.
I have applauded several Iyer books in the pages of Metro over the years and interviewed him at least once, as he was one of those who inspired me when I first started. I remember his soaring profile of Leonard Cohen for Shambhala Sun when Cohen was still living in a Zen monastery in 1998—to this day the best magazine piece on Cohen ever written. I read that story when it came out. At the time, I was just starting to imagine a freelance travel writer’s life and Iyer was among my heroes. So was Cohen, of course. That should go without saying.
As usual, the serendipity didn’t stop there. One shelf below, I spotted another Iyer collection, Sun After Dark, which opened with that same Leonard Cohen story. The book was also a whopping two bucks. I walked out with both of them.
In the intro to Sun After Dark, Iyer pinpointed many reasons why people traveled. To force one’s self into a situation without knowing what will happen. To strip bare the emotions, to oscillate between poverty and sunlight, as Camus wrote, and embrace one’s state as a perpetual stranger.
That sounded like me every time I went to Los Gatos.
Did I mention the thrift store on West Main Street? Among everything else, they had books. A weird variety. I almost walked out with two old-school Frederick Forsyth thrillers. You can probably guess which two. They were both present on the shelves.
Finally, Gatos now has a Barnes & Noble. It’s not bad. The chairs are comfy.
With that, my bookstore tour of Gatos was complete. I saw the light at Beyond Text and I am grateful.
