— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |
With the Jack Spade-backed eviction of Adobe Books from their 16th Street store a done deal, the beloved used bookshop has signed the lease for a new spot on 24th and Shotwell. While the new shop will not official open until July, they're exploring some new business models and giving us a sneak peak at their new digs this Saturday (2-7pm) with Adobe Marketplace:
Join us as we invite local artists and merchants to sell out of the brand new Adobe books. Browse the wares of your talented Bay Area comrades, and enjoy music, food & drinks. This Saturday afternoon event is sponsored by Rainbow Grocery and Speakeasy Ales and Lagers.
A few of our fabulous participants:
- Cool Try, clothing & accessories by artist Ryan De La Hoz
- Shirts by Amos
- The Bold Italic, products by SF locals- along with postcards, posters and other Bold Italic exclusives
- Most Ancient, limited edition books, experimental comics, and art in print form
- SCRAP, scrounger’s center for reusable art parts
- Jewelry by Sea Pony Couture
- Super Classy Publishing, small editions of handmade books
- Jewelry by While Odin Sleeps
- Yam Books, Oakland–based independent small-press publisher of art books, comics, graphic novels, and zines
- Tiny Splendor, publishing collective representing over 30 artists from around the Bay Area and Los Angeles, zines, artist books, prints & more
- Vintage by Annemarie
- Maren Salomon & Megan Hendry, drawings, prints, collages & embroideries
- Eunice, art boxes
- Adobe Books!All bar proceeds and 10% of sales from the marketplace will be donated to help open the new Adobe Books.
Comments (7)
Hopefully people will start buying stuff from them.
while i’m glad that Adobe Books is still alive (and coming to my part of the neighborhood), i wonder how successful they’ll be here. how many bookstores can this part of 24th St really support? there’s already Alley Cat Books and Modern Times in the area
Modern Times is closing (supposedly for not having enough sales to cover the costs/rent), so that's less competition.
It also seems that having an event space is vital to a bookstore these days. Modern Times' new space was too small for events that draw a crowd (and the events were the best thing about their old Valencia location). Adobe seems to be gaining more space for events, never mind all the benefits that will come simply from reorganizing the store.
Edit: Here's the announcement about it on Modern Times' events calendar (they are hosting a meeting about it tomorrow night).
If I remember correctly from my school days, Modern Times used to provide many of the books for various social science classes and that it was a big part of their financial sustainability. They used to show up in our classes to distribute the books as an incentive over Amazon and the like. With those phone price check things so readily available, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have really lost much of that market. Shame, too. It was a great store with a good staff.
Very sad - and obviously not a good sign for the business. Events help, but don’t always translate into sales.
There are MORE indie bookstores popping up all over the country, due to the complete crash from years ago, and chains even crashing. that are meeting some need. But it’s just more replacing the void…..not more that before.
Nothing near the number in the 90’s. It’s not a dead end idea. People love books, and kindle won’t kill it. AK press and PM press
are still in business. FAR left distros, and putting out new titles every month. Still, with a coming depression, It’s gonna be food, rent
and clothes, for ‘most’ of the people that read something other than airport fiction.
Only the bookstores that provide interesting remainders, used books, and the most important titles,will last. Without too much competition.
Book stores are not dying away. Just shrinking. If the rent was not so high, and real estate speculation so favored and subsidized, we might have other for profit community spaces to replace them. but instead we get high end clothing stores, and food genius.
Funny how parts of rome, barcelona, lyon, paris, madrid, etc have massive working class families living among great food places, and high end rich people…that is..„expensive food, then small book store, then great tapas for 1 dollar…then high end clothes……stores.
Wonder why?
As long as they take Swan with them they have my support.