This depressing article author found some old bookmarks in his drawers and seems to have thought he could dismiss Either/Or as a place that was supposed to die. It may have disappeared a decade ago, but the store, began in the 1960’s, was one of the best, if not the best, of the bookstores I’ve known. I’ve lived in Berkeley, Boston, Hawaii, and around Los Angeles, and of course I’ve checked out bookstores in various other locales. In no other location have I found a store that has a catalog that is a rich and precise map of what people in the community are reading. There were almost no books in the store that did not sell- really just a few relics around still from when they were ordered. All of the books were culled from personal orders, recommended reading lists, and the interest of the community and local authors over time. An elephant stocking system kept a placemark for each intent. This was done in a specific, controlled, and monitored manner- one book was ordered as a replacement for each book that sold- this all done by hand with organized notecards, one per book, referenced to the book receipts, with reordering edited only by Richard and Lee’s memory of unsellable books. Books that were requested were ordered immediately and the customer was given a solid and immediate timeframe in which the book would arrive. I am personally upset that someone would consider suggesting that the store was running low on applicable inventory, as the (nn) article seems to suggest. This cannot be anything but a lie given my experience- that is as a former employee of this Pier Avenue bookstore in Hermosa Beach, I am sure of the inventory of approximately 70,000 titles, displayed in a reasonably small browsing area for this kind of bookweight. As book clerks it was our responsibility to keep track of title, genre, and personal interests– the author of that article seems to want to make up an excuse for the store being closed. I can’t answer for Richard or Lee’s reasons for closing the store in the 90’s, but I do know that the author of the article was one who called about an order and was bemused by a fictional name (Peter Pot) rather than a store regular who knew Richard locally. Might seem like I’m going on a bit, but the store was a successful one of a kind and an important intellectual and cultural asset for the beach cities community in the South Bay of Los Angeles.