Berkeley + Moe's Books
The more time I spend in San Francisco, the more qualified my affection for the city becomes.
Where first I saw beauty, now I see banality. The city’s beauty makes it desirable, which makes it expensive, which makes it impossible for all but a lucky few to make it work financially. These are the economics of New York too, but San Francisco has an added challenge – the dominance of the tech industry. The result is not just economic sameness, but cultural sameness too. San Francisco has become a city of reverse commuters, a city of easy charm, a city where that famous beauty can become a bit boring.
Berkeley – a quick east ride across the Oakland-Bay bridge – suffers from sameness of a different sort. Its dominant culture isn’t tech, but academia – it’s a studious, free-thinking, liberal enclave. And yet, because that's my kind of sameness, I feel so differently about this small city than I do about San Francisco. The more time I spend here, the more I fall for it.
I’ve been staying at the Claremont, a private mansion turned hotel that was won from its original owner in a game of checkers. The all-white hotel is genteel and gorgeous, built with double-wide hallways so women in even the grandest hoop skirts could glide along its glossy hardwood unobstructed. Every morning, I throw open the drapes and look down onto the tennis courts below, contemplate hitting a ball around (who am I kidding?), and instead of walking down the hill to breakfast. I queue with my co-workers for walnut and goat cheese croissants from Fournee Bakery, get coffee from Peet’s, and relish both while sitting on a park bench watching the fog lift off the Claremont Hills. It's heaven.
UC Berkeley’s campus is a mile away from the Claremont, and downtown Berkeley a bit further west. This city is an overgrown college town, albeit one studded by some of the best restaurants and real estate in the country – every coffee shop is full of readers, every neighborhood is a magical mashup of Mediterranean and craftsman-style homes, and every restaurant has kombucha on tap. Hell, the whole town smells like eucalyptus! I want to curl up inside of this city – buying myself a Cal sweatshirt, taking my tote bag to the Berkeley Bowl, and spending every weekend browsing the ultimate temple of Berkeley beatnik culture: Moe’s Books.
Moe’s IS Berkeley. As the San Francisco Gate says, “India has the Taj Mahal; Berkeley has Moe's.”
Located on Telegraph Avenue just a few blocks from Sather Gate, Moe’s was founded in 1959 by Moe Moskowitz and his wife, Barbara. Their daughter Doris runs the shop today. Moe’s has four floors – the most popular (and new) stuff is at the bottom, and the higher you climb, the more niche things get. Floors two and three are filled with used books, while the fourth floor is reserved largely for rare finds and first editions. The store has a famously generous trade policy – it pays well for used books, and as a result has become the unofficial source for buying and selling UC Berkeley textbooks.
I’ve been to Moe’s Books several times – first in 2010, then a few years ago, and twice since I started working for a client in nearby Oakland last fall. Every time, this place has delighted me. The staff is kind, the stock wonderfully unpredictable, the store full of people who feel the same way about books as I do. The magic of Moe’s was wonderfully captured in 1978 by Frank Brady and Joann Lawless in Brady & Lawless' Favorite Bookstores:
“Fact: there are over 200,000 books in this store at any given time.
Fact: there are extensive collections of art books, illustrated children’s books, first editions, and scholarly books.
Fact: it is possible to pick up a used copy of Siddhatha for as little as fifty cents or the original edition of The Wizard of Oz for six hundred dollars.
A stop at Moe’s is virtually de riguer during a visit to Berkeley. Although the store is mostly frequented by students and faculty members from the University, there seems to be an endless stream of Bay Area artists and writers coming into the store at all times, and recently Lina Wertmuller browsed the aisles of Moe’s at approximately the same time Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was searching for a book.”
If it’s good enough for Kareem, it’s good enough for me. I wish I could spend a whole day in this fine bookstore (and forever in this fabulous town). But alas, I’m back to Brooklyn soon.