HOLIDAY SCHEDULE DECEMBER 9 – 23: 11-7 DECEMBER 24: 11-3 DECEMBER 25: CLOSED DECEMBER 26: CLOSED DECEMBER 27: 11-7 DECEMBER 28: 11-7 DECEMBER 29 – JANUARY 1: CLOSED
Only a very small portion (about 2%) of our stock is listed here. If there are titles you are searching for beyond those you find on our website, please contact us. We will gladly search our extensive stock of as-yet-uncatalogued material to help locate the items you seek.
Opened by Lee Kaplan in 1987 and newly located in the historic Helms Bakery district, Arcana: Books on the Arts is a fixture of the Los Angeles scene. Photography is a specialty at the store, but the shelves contain far more, including rare and collectible titles on modern and contemporary art, design, architecture, cinema, music, and fashion. Long a favorite of Hollywood insiders (John Waters can regularly be seen flitting through the stacks), Arcana’s selection is unparalleled and the staff is knowledgeable and friendly.
John Waters: Ooohh. Well, my nightstand is little. But, let's see. There is the book Joe Dallesandro: Warhol Superstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor. A little pad that I always have here for ideas, there are a couple books. Three books that I'll probably look at tonight, the British book about the film Victim, a Mike Kelley catalog called "Photographs/Sculptures," and a photography book of really extreme photographs that I haven't read yet by Billy Monk. I just bought them at my favorite art book shops in Los Angeles called Arcana.
With independent bookstores dropping like proverbial flies, it was welcome news that Arcana — long the go-to purveyor in Los Angeles for rare and out-of-print books on art, photography, architecture, design, fashion and music, among other subjects — was not only thriving but moving from its cramped space on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica to much larger quarters in the Helms Bakery complex in Culver City. The new Arcana Books on the Arts shop opened its doors quietly a couple of weeks ago as the more than 100,000 books in stock were being shelved and the finishing touches were being put on its airy, open space.
Lee Kaplan, who founded Arcana in 1984, and who owns and runs it with his wife, Whitney, has always worked with local architects. For this incarnation of the store, he turned to Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee of Johnston Marklee. Kaplan knew Mark Lee well, since the architect, a passionate book lover, has been a regular customer for years. Johnston Marklee, with Katrin Terstegen serving as the project architect, worked closely on the build-out of the new store with Brock Mayeux of Landlocd, a design/build firm, filling the 4,500-square-foot space with rows of tall black powder-coated metal shelves that create what Lee calls a “forest of books.” “We basically took a bright, light-filled space and inserted several black boxes into it,” he explains. Two of the black boxes bridge the space between the entrance — where books and current, hard-to-find magazines are on display — and the bookshelves, with one serving as the checkout area and the other as Kaplan’s office. Cutout windows at their corners maintain the openness of the space. Since it was important to Johnston Marklee to retain some of the store’s history, they reused pieces by previous Arcana architects, including plywood bookshelves by Gary Paige and a table by Robert Mangurian and Mary Ann Ray, creating what Lee describes as “a palimpsest of the former store designs.”
Kaplan, who considers himself a caretaker of books, couldn’t be happier with the new shop. “The books can breathe and, in some ways,” he says, “it’s like starting over. With limited time and resources but unlimited creativity.” Arcana is located at 8675 Washington Boulevard in the heart of Culver City’s lively Arts District, near galleries, restaurants and theaters. On June 17, the store will host a reception for “Notes From a Revolution: Com/co, the Diggers & the Haight,” a new release from Foggy Notion Press.
BOOK LAUNCH + CELEBRATION TUESDAY, JULY 17th 4 - 7
In honor of Lee Clow, @leeclowsbeard is the first publication of Let There Be Dragons, a new multimedia studio. For four decades, Lee Clow has created and shepherded radical and iconic advertising ideas that move us emotionally. Clow has become a legend within the advertising industry and one of its most visible spokesmen. Yet his wisdom, wit, and positions on advertising, business, and life have never been compiled in a single place - until now.
A young writer named Jason Fox, previously unknown to Clow, began channeling him on Twitter with tweets that were said to have emanated from Clow's signature beard. Day-by-day, @leeclowsbeard offered up sly and witty 140-character sentences that inspired people to come up with better ideas and offered suggestions on how to persuade clients on how to buy these better notions.
Today, @leeclowsbeard boasts over 20,000 followers worldwide, along with (the real) Lee Clow's support. Some of the most choice posts have been compiled here along with captivating photographs of Clow himself. It's a must-read for anyone involved in advertising, marketing, business at large, and creative fields of all types.
Please join us in Culver City's Historic Helms Bakery at the new Arcana: Books on the Arts designed by Johnston Marklee in collaboration with Landlocd for refreshments, an exclusive limited "signed" edition of the @leeclowsbeard book, and the chance to check out the new Let There Be Dragons mobile office designed by Jeffrey Allsbook of Standard Architecture.
NOTES FROM A REVOLUTION: COM/CO, THE DIGGERS & THE HAIGHT
A COMPENDIUM OF THE POSTERS AND BROADSIDES THAT PROLIFERATED
IN HAIGHT-ASHBURY DURING THE MID ‘60s
BOOK LAUNCH + FILM SCREENING + CONVERSATION JUNE 17th 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
The social upheaval of the sixties gave rise to fascinating coalitions and communes, but the Diggers stand apart from them all. Formed in Haight-Ashbury in 1966 by members of R. G. Davis's subversive theater company, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Diggers took their name from the English Diggers, a seventeenth century agrarian collective devoted to creating a utopian society free of ownership and commerce.
A critically important part of their methodology were the hundreds posters and broadsides that proliferated in Haight-Ashbury during the mid ‘60s. A compendium of these graphically inventive, lacerating and sometimes funny posters and broadsides are gathered together for the first time in Notes From a Revolution, which offers a fascinating and oddly moving record of the counterculture in its early bloom.
Powder-coated-steel display shelves punctuate the store
If we step into another bookstore that’s going out of business, we’re going to cry. So we’re grateful to Arcana: Books on the Arts for doubling down on its bet that the indie bookstore isn’t dying. In Arcana’s case, it’s just expanded and moved to Culver City.
Open since 1984, Arcana’s rare book collection--photo-heavy volumes about contemporary art, photography, rock ‘n’ roll and more--has long been the secret garden of area bookworms, even though it operated out of a cramped Santa Monica shop. Now its 100,000 titles reside in a window-wrapped 5,000-square-foot loft space on Washington Boulevard. The original Rudolf Schindler–meets–Donald Judd plywood shelves made the move, too, supplemented by 132 steel shelves structurally engineered and bolted to the foundation to survive the big one. The new space was designed by Johnston Marklee (best known for the spidery gas station at Robertson and Olympic) in conjunction with Landlocd.
Sixty-five percent of the stock is out of print but decidedly in vogue. Did you miss the recent Hedi Slimane MOCA show? Pick up his photo anthology ($55). Interested in recently deceased artist Mike Kelley? Here’s a catalog of his most famous works ($35). Want to read more about the late Vidal Sassoon? Arcana has his autobiography ($32).
Best of all, the shop’s knowledgeable staff is eager to act as your literary concierge, recommending books on a wide range of topics. Arcana: Books on the Arts has us thinking outside the big-box store.
Arcana: Books on the Arts, 8675 Washington Blvd., Culver City; 310-458-1499 or arcanabooks.com
If you're one of those shoppers who struts into bookstores, clutching a latte in one hand and wrangling a book off the shelf with the other, Lee Kaplan thinks you should be a little ashamed of yourself. Lee and his wife, Whitney, own Arcana Books on the Arts, one of the best bookstores around for new and used books on contemporary visual arts. Not only is that latte a threat to the merchandise in a commercial sense, but it's also a nasty slur against the bound and printed page.
"We're not big fans of liquid in our store," says Lee. Embarrassed, I recall that I walked in for our interview with a big, dumb, styrofoam cup of coffee. "A majority of people would walk in with their bag from Barnes & Noble and their cup of coffee. We'd say" -- his voice becomes light and decorous -- "'Can we please check those at the counter for you?' And they'd assume we were accusing them of stealing, turn on their heels and walk out." Lee swivels his eyes as if to say, I don'tget it. "But most people would peek their head in and think we were too weird." read the rest here...
We've yet to create individual postings for our waaay past events. They include...
Bruce Weber, Ed and Deanna Templeton, David Byrne, William Eggleston, Michael Hodgson, Marc Joseph, Dante Ferretti, Clive Piercy, Peter Beard, Russell James, and Andrew MacPherson.
Seeing Things | Arcana’s Next Chapter
