Libros Schmibros Books Time at Hammer Museum

When David Kipen, a founder of the Boyle Heights bookshop and lending library Libros Schmibros, meets people he hands out a business card that reads, “Los Angeles is like your brain. You only ever use 20 percent of it. But imagine if we used it all.”

Kipen apparently has taken a page from his own book. Now through Oct. 9, he's set up a version of his Eastside-based literary vision across town in Westwood at the Hammer Museum.

The original Libros Schmibros—a tip of the hat to its birthplace as well as its Jewish owner—is a community gathering place where customers can browse, borrow and buy. Visitors to the exhibit at the Hammer Museum are invited to do the same.

Responding to an increase in bookstore closings as well as cutbacks in library hours, Kipen wanted to provide a place where locals could stroll through shelves of literary classics, both donated and from his own extensive collection, and pay a little or nothing at all. Books by authors including Goethe, Proust, Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and Mona Simpson can be checked out for weeks at a time or purchased for a suggested donation of half the cover price.

The Westwood incarnation, which is outfitted with colorful paper lanterns, a literary map of Los Angeles created by J. Michael Walker, a smiling calavera and an entry painted by local artist Joel Kyack, also has a dedicated California section.

“I grew up in this neighborhood, when you could find half a dozen really great bookstores just here in Westwood,” Kipen said. “With the closing of the Mystery Bookstore six months or so ago, that was the last of them.”

“But I have to think that this is just—this era that we’re living through now—is more of a hiatus than a diminuendo for book culture,” he added.

The Hammer’s Public Engagement program, curated by Allison Agsten, is doing its part to revive that culture by taking the unconventional step of putting a bookstore on display.

“I think that people who connect with art tend to connect with books and vice versa,” Agsten said, “and so it seemed like, in many ways, a natural pairing to bring Libros Schmibros to an institution like the Hammer.”

So, in a time when iPads and Kindles are taking over households, how telling is it that a bookstore has become a museum piece?

“A museum isn’t a place to ossify,” said Colleen Jaurretche, co-director of Libros Schmibros, whose family is from Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights and who also taught in the English department at UCLA. “A museum is a place to bring people and ideas and works of art together. So, in a sense, that’s right where we belong.”

Westwood resident and Hammer member Paula Nordwind called the residency interesting and said she would be donating books very soon, but other visitors wondered whether it was art or simply a bookstore.

 “I like the fact that this exists, but I would like it to be more like a museum installation,” said Mario Gandelsonas, a professor of architectural design at Princeton University, who was at the Hammer to meet a colleague. “It’s too realistic. It looks like a bookstore.”

Angsten was happy to hear that visitors were looking at Hammer offerings in a different way.

“I think it’s really great when we can create a museum experience that does ask our audience to rethink the sort of things that can happen in the galleries,” she said.

Kipen, too, took time to reflect on the perceived incongruity.

“As I was shelving these books last week,” he said, “it occurred to me, there’s two ways to look at this. Either I’m not an artist, and this is all kind of silly but fun. Or Doug Dutton [of now-closed Brentwood bookstore Dutton’s] and the woman who ran Mystery Bookstore, and all the great booksellers in Southern California were unrecognized artists too. And, I guess if I have an opportunity to take a bow for that, a way to justify it is to think I’m taking a bow for them too.”