How many bookstores around here can last 70 years? We’re about to find out.
On Saturday, Sept. 20, Kepler’s in Menlo Park celebrates its 70th anniversary with a block party from 2 to 5pm. Since I wrote a column on this page for the 50th anniversary and then another for the 60th anniversary, there is no possible way for me to separate the journey of this column from the story of Kepler’s, especially since it all started long before I was even born, that is, if one even believes in absolute beginnings.
At the Kepler’s 50th anniversary party, several dynamics all came together in glorious fashion. The event featured live music, raffles, games, prizes and book bags filled with the best books from the last five decades. For the raffle, I sat right next to Joan Baez. I didn’t even realize it was her until she bagged one of the prizes.
You see, Baez was, and still is, one of many heroic individuals whose stories are likewise inseparable from the journey of Kepler’s bookstore. Others include the Grateful Dead, Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand and Steve Wozniak.
So where did it all start? Well, Roy Kepler first opened the place in May of 1955. It seems odd now, but back in the ’50s, most publishers, as well as the general public, didn’t consider paperbacks to be “real” books. The entire concept of peddling texts in cheap paperbound volumes was a radical affront to the publishing trade. Roy Kepler, along with Fred and Pat Cody in Berkeley, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights in San Francisco, changed all of that. Bay Area bookstores became the leaders of the “paperback revolution,” as it came to be called. It could only have happened in Northern California.
A World War II conscientious objector, Kepler also helped spearhead the American peace movement for decades, spending his entire adult life opposing violence. In 1960, Roy and others were arrested at the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory for protesting against nuclear weapons. And that wasn’t the only time the authorities carried him away.
Kepler’s became a catch-all for every outcast imaginable. Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Pigpen of the Grateful Dead supposedly first met each other while loitering around Kepler’s and making a racket. When Ken Kesey needed someone to drive the Merry Prankster bus, he dispatched Neal Cassady straight from Kepler’s to plot the cross-country spectacle. Hitchhikers often stopped by Kepler’s on their way up and down the coast. It was a central focal point for bohemians who weren’t welcome anywhere else. Baez and her pacifist guru Ira Sandperl became regulars, with Sandperl manning the register for decades. As the legend goes, Kepler’s was the first place to stock both Playboy and the Paris Review right next to each other. Steve Wozniak and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand have both cited Kepler’s as a place integral to their youth.
Over the years, controversy arrived in all shapes and forms. During the Vietnam era, when a second store existed in Los Altos, violent right-wingers who needed an enemy tossed a bomb through the window. In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on author Salman Rushdie, prompting bookstores everywhere to remove The Satanic Verses from their shelves. Kepler’s did no such thing. Instead, the store organized a public reading from the book by Ira Sandperl. Baez performed just for the occasion.
At the 50th anniversary party in 2005, I picked up a 27-page orange-colored pamphlet, “Kepler’s: 50 Years of Independent Bookselling,” written by journalist Michael Doyle. One dollar of each purchase went to the Resource Center for Non-violence. At the time, Doyle was collecting memories and much of the pamphlet later wound up in his 2012 hardback volume, Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution.
By the time the Kepler’s 60th anniversary party rolled around in 2015, Radical Chapters was for sale and I bought a copy at the party. I still have the hardback and the original 27-page pamphlet. At that party, everyone was also given a name tag with space to write down how long they’d been shopping at Kepler’s. I put “forever.”
This weekend, the 70th anniversary party will yet again cement Kepler’s in the annals of history. Long live the revolution!
