The Last Bookstore
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds
L.A.’s famous The Last Bookstore is quite a place not only to find books, but to cave in to whimsy, as its decor (particularly in the upstairs section) might find you walking through a tunnel of books, or you might happen to be there when one of the shelves suddenly swings open, revealing it to be a door to an employees-only area. And since Dr. Mrs. The AAUGH Blogger and I were in downtown to see a performance by Tim Minchin and to basically get some us-time together, a visit to this bookstore filled with tomes both new and used seemed a way to cap it off. I purchased a copy of Max Schulman’s Barefoot Boy with Cheek (which I already had in paperback, but this was a hardcover edition from the 1940s) and Doc picked up a book on making electric guitars, another on making violins, and the third edition (1962) of How to play the 5-string Banjo by Pete Seeger. (She does have a thing for both building and playing musical instruments – not pro level at either, but they make her happy.)
And what old book did we find with a small bit of Peanuts content? Here’s a hint: I’ve already mentioned it.
That’s right, on page 9 of Seeger’s banjo book, there’s a reprint of a Peanuts comic strip, included with permission. Which strip? Well, if you guessed it would be the January 4, 1960 one wherein Linus suggests a way to bring babies into this world in a better state, you’d be right. And Seeger, who both wrote and published this book himself, clearly had seen the strip as something worth adding to his existing knowledge-filled tome. It first appeared in this third edition; the second edition came out in 1954, before this particular strip existed, and the first in 1948, before Peanuts itself had come into existence. We were lucky we got this particular edition; the Peanuts content wasn’t the reason she bought the book, she just discovered it on the way home.
