Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution

Introduction

xiii Introduction Closed. Kepler’s was closed. How could this be? All morning, offerings and memories mounted outside the locked doors of Kepler’s Books & Magazines in Menlo Park, California. Sun- flowers and white roses were laid as at a bier. Mourners gathered in the nearby plaza, singly and then en masse. Cars slowed along El Camino Real, the Silicon Valley artery congesting more than usual. Kepler’s hosted many demonstrations over the years: perhaps this was another. Drivers dawdled and then moved along, unsure of what they had just witnessed. On the plaza, the first-arriving customers had gone through a common dumb show. They came, found the store doors locked, checked their watches, gave the handle a futile jiggle. They placed their hands to their eyebrows and peered through the windows. They could see the familiar stacks and shelves, but no human movement. They read the confounding sign: “Kepler’s is Closed,” and they looked around as if there might be an explanation. It had started out such a lovely morning for bookstore browsing : August 31, 2005. The San Francisco Bay Area was in its glory, a monied, Mediterranean climate. Inside Kepler’s, brightly colored banners still hung from the store’s recently celebrated fiftieth anniversary. Some old-timers considered this latest cladding too sterile. Certainly the store was no longer revolutionary, the way it had been in May 1955 when Roy Kepler started selling paperbacks in his little Menlo Park . . . well, closet was what it was, back in the beginning. Still, as the gathering mourners told each other over and over: Kepler’s was xiv  Introduction a great bookstore. If it was a book, Kepler’s had it: 100,000 titles, at last count. It was the nation’s best bookseller, Publishers Weekly had proclaimed several years earlier. But books could be bought anywhere. Amazon.com or the big chains enticed with low prices, as the owners of independent bookstores like Kepler’s knew all too well. Kepler’s was, and here the gathering mourners searched for the right word and always found the same one: Kepler’s was an institution. Its staff was famously freespirited . “We fit,” former Kepler’s book buyer and poet Susan MacDonald once wrote, “like a badly knit sweater / all holes and space, but warm.” The store itself was living history. Even casual customers could recite the chapter summaries; some were fortunate enough to know the principals. “Roy Kepler. Dear Roy Kepler,” singer Joan Baez had said, when asked about him by the Palo Alto Weekly in 1984. “Steady, solid, nonviolent rock. Lovely man.” Roy Kepler was a World War II conscientious objector, educated and rendered more radical in a series of Civilian Public Service camps. He served as executive secretary of the War Resisters League. He founded myriad peace groups. He was a tax resister, a congressional witness, and a correspondent with the high and mighty. He helped promote the nation’s first listener-supported radio station. He helped found one of the nation’s first free universities. He survived a series of violent attacks. His store nurtured remarkable musicians when they were young and disreputable. He helped propel the paperback revolution and trained several generations of young booksellers. “Roy,” Grateful Dead lyricist and early Kepler’s aficionado Robert Hunter said, “was an important man.” The plaza crowd swapped names like playing cards. Roy was Joan Baez’s money manager, the man who helped guide her into tax resistance . His store welcomed a young Jerry Garcia, providing baklava and a place to hang. Roy debated pacifist tactics with the Chicago Seven’s David Dellinger. Roy marched with Bayard Rustin, the immensely influential African American pacifist. When Ken Kesey needed someone to drive a bus, The Bus, he found his man abuzz at Kepler’s. Introduction  xv When the young computer wiz Steve Wozniak needed an engineering book, he too went to Kepler’s. “It’s almost certain that half of the books that bent my young mind, I got from there,” said Stewart Brand, who begat the Whole Earth Catalog and its progeny. Kepler’s encounters changed lives. Take just one: In the fall of 1959, Douglas Hofstadter was fourteen years old. His father was a Stanford University physicist, later to win the 1961 Nobel Prize, and the family had just returned from a sabbatical year in Switzerland. One evening Hofstadter and his father went...