Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution

16 Roots and Branches

286 16 Roots and Branches Stewart Brand started swinging by Kepler’s around the time he graduated from Stanford in 1960. Here, he thought, was a bookstore run for something other than money. Himself a venturesome soul, Brand did a turn as an airbornequali fied army officer following his college graduation. He started making other leaps. By December 1962 Brand had swallowed his first legal dose of LSD through the auspices of the International Federation for Advanced Study, a small Menlo Park outfit unassumingly located above a beauty shop not far from Kepler’s. There, starting in 1960, hundreds of individuals had been provided still-legal LSD or mescaline. Thoroughly turned on, Brand would in time emerge from the psychedelic carnival realizing that the counterculture needed tools and provisioning (Turner 2006). By the spring of 1968, flush with about $100,000 in inherited stock, Brand was delving through Kepler’s and other bookstores, pulling together ideas. He was going to help people equip themselves. In July he printed the first, mimeographed list of items for sale. Around the corner from Kepler’s Books & Magazines, Brand opened the Whole Earth Truck Store for the selling of necessities. The Menlo Park location was no coincidence. Brand considered himself within the orbit of Kepler’s, the place that was both inspiration and provider. “Roy helped make that a cool part of town,” Brand said. The Whole Earth Truck Store would be relatively short lived, but in time Brand’s inaugural six-page mimeographed Whole Earth Catalog would grow to a 448-page encyclopedia, winner of the 1972 National Book Award. It was a smash success, commercially and aesthetically, Roots and Branches  287 and while not precisely a child of Kepler’s it did have a trace of Kepler’s DNA in it. So did other places, other movements. Kepler’s provided training, connections, and inspiration for several generations of activist organizations, charities, and, naturally, bookstores. The summer after Brand opened his Whole Earth Truck Store, Kim Desenberg and other recent peace-minded Stanford graduates opened Plowshare Books on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. They were consciously following in Roy’s footsteps, though placing a particularly strong emphasis on books about higher consciousness , mysticism, and Eastern religions. They set aside a back room for community gatherings. For some, Plowshare Books seemed to distill the pure essence of Kepler’s; when the Stanford Students for a Democratic Society published its 1969 guide for new students, they recommended Plowshare over Kepler’s. Menlo Park native Walter Carr, too, had grown up impressed by Kepler’s. “It was this voluminous, high-ceiling place,” Carr told the Seattle Times in a July 30, 1990, article, “and [Roy] always had these enormous hi-fi speakers playing classical music.” In 1972, at the age of twenty-nine, Carr relocated to Seattle. The Bay Area was congested with bookstores, but Carr figured Seattle was still open turf. In June 1973 he opened the Elliot Bay Book Company in Pioneer Square, and over time built it into one of the city’s most beloved places. Kepler’s, Carr made clear, directly influenced him, as it had influenced others. A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books opened in the Bay Area city of Cupertino in 1975, later expanding to San Francisco. The store’s owner, Neal Sofman, had gotten his start at Kepler’s. Susan MacDonald, a budding poet who got her bookstore start in 1968 at Kepler’s, would join with other Kepler’s alumni in 1977, opening Palo Alto’s hugely successful Printers Inc. bookstore. Each of the stores would have great runs before falling prey to the same commercial forces that undermined Kepler’s, but the Kepler’s progeny went well beyond paperback commerce.  288  Radical Chapters In the spring of 1969, Roy and six friends convened in the Stanford Faculty Club. They wanted to advance a discussion that had reportedly started in Santa Rita jail following some peace demonstration arrests. The notion was a peace endowment, a nonprofit organization that could collect money and spread it among the worthy. The idea drifted a bit, until the Stanford Faculty Club get-together. Roy, San Jose attorney and activist Robert Weir, retired geologist and World War II veteran Robert Wesley Brown, and the others spoke of the need to raise funds and the difficulty in doing so without the benefit of tax deductions. “The...