Michael Doyle (2)

Keith, a dear friend and loyal supporter of our bookstores sent me a copy of Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution many moons ago, and I just got into it. For those unfamiliar with the focus of the book, Roy Kepler was the founder of Kepler’s Books & Magazines of Menlo Park, California, which has been kicking around since 1955, developing into a true bookselling institution. In the following year, he helped Pat and Fred Cody make contacts with publishers as they opened their first store north of campus. Getting into selling books in the 1950s was a heady and a transitional time, and over the years there were many informal connections between Kepler’s and the two other Bay Area institutions, Cody’s and City Lights in San Francisco.

As the books says, “It took courage to enter this paperback jungle. In the San Francisco Bay Area, three outposts arose within a few years of each other. They would be three points of a magic triangle. Between them, Roy Kepler, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the team of Pat and Fred Cody would build the stores in which a generation would find itself.”

In 1935, Penguin only offered ten titles and in 1939 Pocket Books sold their paperback for twenty-five cents. Paperback books weren’t just another format choice back then, they were new and a little controversial, when compared to the tried-and-true hardback. They gained huge visibility when around 123 million paperbacks were put into the troops’ hands in the form of Armed Services Edition during WWII. In the mid-50s, paperbacks (pulp) were viewed by some as coarse, cheap, and morally soft. Someone at that Boston institution, the Old Corner Bookstore, said of the new paperbacks, they’ll “Be dead and gone in five years.” [Even when I was in college in the seventies, there were stores that still only sold paperbacks. Paperback was often in the store’s name, and some had those creepy wire racks that could only hold mass market sized editions stretching all through the store.] By the beginning of 1964, 5,000 paperback stores had sales of $90 million.

Roy Kepler’s first bookstore opened in May of 1955 and grew and grew over the years, even having a second location in Los Altos, which was finally sold off in 1980. Ira Sanperl, who was a vital Kepler’s employee in so many ways, said that after Roy hired him, “I didn’t get out of there for twenty-five years,” which is familiar to many book lovers who work in bookstores.

The non-bookseller side of Kepler (a Fulbright scholar) was always involved, many times as a leader of organizations involved with issues of peace, nonviolence, draft and tax resistance, anti-nuclear, freedom of speech, and especially protesting the Vietnam War. But the bookstore was also another way to try and educate and help people become more aware of what was happening in the world, and how they could get involved. Kepler was jailed and held in many different jails and camps (including Shasta-Trinity National Forest and in Michigan) for his protests and as a conscientious objector during World War Two. CO status was harder to come by if you weren’t claiming it on religious grounds. As Kepler found out, you can’t just be personally and profoundly against war; you should have some god telling you that. He also argued against the public thinking of civil defense as anything useful, as it could protect only 15% of the 15 million Californians of the time … if they had the time to even get to a shelter. Prevention of war was the answer, not bunkers to slowly die in.

Roy’s beliefs were reflected in the store, and it attracted a wild array of people, including Joan Baez, Jerry Garcia and other members of the Dead and their songwriter Robert Hunter, Alan Watts, Robert Stone, Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth fame), Steve Wozniak, and many others. “There was no bookstore like it,” Wozniak said. “Kepler’s was as important a source of good knowledge in my field as my college courses were.” Kepler helped take care of Baez’s financial affairs for a number of years, as well as serving on many boards and committees with her. In 1984 Baez said of Kepler, “Steady, solid, non-violent rock. Lonely man.” Sanperl had an intense friendship with her and served as her tutor. Robert Stone wrote in his short story, “From the Lowlands,” that the bookstore was known as a place where you “could smoke dope and pick up chicks at Kepler’s” Roy once had Jerry Garcia debate David Dellinger (of the Chicago 7) about pacifist tactics at the store. In 1958, while Kepler was working with KQED, he set up an on-air conversation between Edward Teller and Linus Pauling on the abolition of nuclear testing. Doyle writes in the book, “Slowly, slowly, Kepler’s was becoming known as an intellectually tolerant place. It was highbrow, middlebrow, and occasionally lowbrow all at the same time.”

Roy Kepler was very vocal as a pacifist and at times withheld the 60% share of his federal taxes destined for the war effort, but when it became routine for the IRS to just seize the money out of his bank account, his protests had to take other forms. When during the sixties protest, the store’s windows were smashed several times, and once a hatchet came through the store’s front window with a note reading “First Chairman Mao, Then Kepler.” For a while employees would be stationed hidden outside to watch for vandals. [In a different time and for different reasons (1989), I remember Vicky and I going to Cody’s on Telegraph and seeing where the floor was blackened from a firebomb thrown through a window at night. That was to protest the store selling Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.] Doyle quotes Kepler, “One skeptic asked Roy how he could call the U.S. military effort immoral at the same time he kept “an abundance of pornography” in his store.” Kepler responded, “Whereas I am opposed to war and violence,” Roy said. “I’m in favor of sex.”

It was 1977 that Fred Cody sold his store to Andy Ross, as he discovered that he had cancer and died of a heart attack in 1983. Eventually, Kepler tired of the long hours and moved to Grass Valley and wasn’t as involved with the store, and it was found that he had Parkinson’s, later dying in 1994. Though he hadn’t wanted to at first, Roy’s son Clark Kepler decided to take over the store in 1980, and it wasn’t until August of 2005 that the store suddenly closed up when they ran out of all options. But the community pulled together and a group of fifteen investors raised the funds to reopen the store less than two months later. As Clark Kepler said, “Miracles started happening,”

The book goes long into the many causes and groups that Roy Kepler was passionate about, but for myself, a bookseller through and through, I wanted more about the bookselling side of the man, but I can assume that wouldn’t sell as many books as talking more about the entire man. Fascinating to think what the store has meant to so many people over the years, from when Garcia and the boys would be playing there, and Wozniak was reading books that helped him develop the personal computer, to actually closing down the store for a very brief period, before investors came to the rescue and gave it more life. Bookstores are vital to their communities and their communities are vital to the society in countless ways. Go on, support your local independent bookstore.… (mehr)