Thanks to Aperture for featuring us in your "best bookstores" post! 

Top 5 Photo Bookstores—San Francisco and Los Angeles

By Darius Himes

Arcana

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.

http://aperture.org/pbr/pbr004-top-5-photo-bookstores-san-francisco-and-los-angeles/

Seeing Things | Arcana’s Next Chapter

By Brooke Hodge

June 7, 2012

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.

Topical Aisles

An art bookshop’s shiny new HQ

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't get it. "But most people would peek their head in and think we were too weird." read the rest here...

His Future Is Now

His space-age vision thrilled on the Paris runway. Now, Nicolas Ghesquiere is ready to take on L.A.

Booth Moore
August 3, 2008

It's a cloudless day in L.A., and Nicolas Ghesquiere is showing me around his greenhouse. It's actually the new Balenciaga store in the pool blue shadow of the Pacific Design Center, but it could well be some otherworldly garden. Here, in this spectacular tinted glass space on Melrose Avenue, the color-daubed dresses and tops from his spring collection hang like hothouse flowers.

"When you drive by at night, it looks like the whole store is blue and moving," Ghesquiere says, gazing out at the cacti in front of the Space Age meets California Organic building, which he designed with French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.

For a Parisian, he's really got this L.A. thing down.

The truth is Ghesquiere, 35, is no stranger to this city, where he has been shooting the Balenciaga ad campaigns for four seasons, holing up at the Bel-Air for a week at a time and planning the store, the second Balenciaga location in the U.S. He even has a list of favorite spots: Matsuhisa, Sunset Tower, the Polo Lounge, Arcana bookstore in Santa Monica.

"I understand why people live here," he says.

JOURNEYS; 36 Hours | Santa Monica, Calif.

By STUART EMMRICH

Published: June 14, 2002

"5. Shopping Mecca

Take a walk down the Third Street Promenade, a bustling thoroughfare of restaurants, fashion boutiques, bookstores and movie theaters. In between buying a pair of baggy cargo pants at Abercrombie & Fitch or grabbing a decaf latte at Barnes & Noble, stop by Arcana Books on the Arts (1229 Third Street) to browse through its magnificent collection of rare and out-of-print books on 20th-century art, architecture and design, with everything from the collected works of the architect Richard Neutra ($150) to a beautifully packaged history of the influential midcentury arts magazine Flair ($250)."