Tacos at a filling station and another, better, used bookstore

The front window of Book Alley, 1252 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, 91106,
an amazing used bookstore that is a browser's delight.

Even though last weekend was supposed to be the book trip, we found a used bookstore on Saturday that has all the Hollywood places beat: Book Alley, in Pasadena. We had tickets for Noises Off, at the A Noise Within theater, and my husband Jim (the cruise director and master of the revels) thought that we should hit this bookstore he had read about in his research for a recent newspaper story.

Jim in the children's section at Book Alley.

In case you forgot that the New Year's Rose Parade goes down Colorado Blvd., the remains of Silly String on the road and sidewalks are a colorful reminder. Spraying Silly String became illegal in 1992 with a city ordinance, but lots of people remain scofflaws.

We parked on a side street, and the neon green, pink and blue stains got more Jackson Pollock-like the closer we got to Colorado. We noticed a place with sidewalk umbrellas the block behind the store, and made a note to check it out for lunch.

Book Alley's welcoming entrance immediately placed it well above the places we saw last week. I hadn't been in it but a few minutes, when I whispered to my husband: "I love this place!" There were lots of interesting books faced out on easels that drew me in, but also books stacked on the floor.

In fact, it's the perfect combination of organization and clutter, much like my own systems. The shelves are arranged into categories and alphabetized, but there are books on the floor, on the counters — hell, on every flat surface. The lady who helped us said it wasn't usually that messy, they were doing a reorganization, but that's my excuse to drop-in guests, too.

Don't you just want to know
what's in those stacks?

If you want something specific (Jim was looking for John Fante), you can find it, but there is enough randomness in other parts of the store to satisfy the bibliophile's urge to root around and seek out titles you didn't know you needed until you see it.

Another wonderful touch for English majors is that they file biographies and literary analyses right with the author's work, which makes for some wonderful discoveries. For $15, I picked up Feasting with Panthers: A New Consideration of Some Late Victorian Writers, by Rupert Croft-Cooke, written in 1967.

I must admit that this examination of how Charles Swinburne, John Addington Symonds and Oscar Wilde "made a cult out of their own sexual idiosyncrasies" appealed to my prurient fascination. But I've read a number of more mannered biographies about Wilde, including one that argued he was a better Catholic than anyone supposed, so I feel entitled.

They were out of Ask the Dust (it is Fante's best-known work), but they did have Dreams of Bunker Hill, so Jim bought that. I bought a first edition of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo, for $5, probably because the reviews were lukewarm. I figure that DeLillo, who was a 21st century author well before the millennium, was the ideal man to write about 9/11, about which I haven't read any fiction. The critics probably wanted another White Noise, and what author has more than one of those in him or her?

This cabinet has drawers of programs,
guide books, and other cool
ephemera for sale.

The store has more books than you see on the selling floor; they also have a huge space that I can only suppose is a staging area for books before they put them out on the shelf. The nice lady helping us gave a peek into this room, and just looking at the floor to ceiling shelves and piles upon piles of books gave me an overwhelmed feeling.

I was glad to get back to the less-chaotic sales floor. When we checked out, I found a stack of old children's books on the counter waiting to be priced, including a facsimile reprint of a book my mother had when she was a child, Four Little Puppies.

Her copy was a 1936 original, but it had crayon markings on every page. Whether she or her younger brother did the enhancing, I can't say, but I loved it as a child, and was happy to pay $4 for the new edition.

The Coca-Cola wonderland that is Norma's Tacos,
a block off Colorado right behind Book Alley.

Book Alley had some of the other titles in the series, featuring cats and bunnies dressed up in clothes doing things normal families do: kids play in the yard, mom cooks in the kitchen, and dad sits in his chair smoking a pipe. Really cute stuff if you don't think about it too hard.

I fear for all bookstores these days, but Book Alley has an online component, which might help them beat the odds. If you are looking for something specific, you can go to their website, search for it and buy it online. Now that I have discovered them, I never want them to close, and I regret every dime I spent at Cosmopolitan.

We went back to the joint on the corner we had spied, which turned out to be Norma's Tacos, a walk-up taqueria made out of a vintage gas station. I don't know if the red and silver pumps are the same ones as when it dispensed gasoline, but it is really charming. The food is fantastic, and reasonably priced, especially important if you've just blown your wad on books. I had carne asada tacos, which were great, but I regretted not getting the tacos with crispy potatoes inside. Ah well, next time.

The combo of Book Alley, Comics Factory (just a few doors down from Book Alley, where Jim bought Fatale, a new noir comic book), Norma's Tacos, and a matinee at A Noise Within made for a satisfying Pasadena outing away from the bustle of downtown. It could be a reasonably priced excursion, depending on how well you can control your book habit.