By Mary Rourke | Staff Writer
As a rare book dealer in Pacific Palisades, Richard Mohr had a special fondness for the number, one. First editions and one of a kind collectibles were his stock and trade. When he opened his business, International Bookfinders, in the 1950s Mohr shipped and received his treasured discoveries from the post office. But it wasn’t the ideal arrangement. Every morning he drove to Beverly Hills, the closest post office to home, and picked up his mail from box number 3003, nothing flashy about it.
That changed in 1959 when Pacific Palisades opened a new post office on La Cruz Drive, a quick trip from Mohr’s home office on upper Chautauqua Boulevard. Mohr saw his chance, made his move and captured another first, P.O. Box One. For the rest of his life he kept that mailing address and after he died in 2002 his son, Mark held onto to the box. But a career move to Spokane, Washington left Mark on the lookout for an appreciative new keeper. ‘I wanted to see the memory of International Bookfinders and the legacy of Box One continue in good hands,’ he says. That wish led him to the Pacific Palisades Library Association, better known as Friends of the Library, the group assigned to P.O. Box Two. This spring the Friends took over Box One while general library mail still goes to Box Two.
‘It is bittersweet for me,’ says Mohr of the new arrangement. ‘I have great memories of the years when my parents ran International Bookfinders out of their house and the Palisades post office.’
For more than three decades the literary delights that Richard Mohr shipped and received from Box One could fill an antiquarian mall. First editions of works by popular authors from Mark Twain to Kurt Vonnegut, out-of-print art books, histories of the American West that were a specialty of Mohr’s, pounds of correspondence from rare book dealers and collectors brought him back to the post office as often as three times in a day.
‘As a kid, I accompanied my mom and dad to drop off and pick up the mail.’ (His mother, Martha, took care of the business accounts). Mark was hardly five years old when he saw Ronald Reagan, still the actor not yet the Republican politician, in line to get his mail. Reagan was dressed in riding breeches that billowed at the hips. ‘I couldn’t resist grabbing those pants from behind, to my mom’s eternal shame,’ Mohr says.
As a student at Paul Revere Junior High, as it was known then, Mohr went with his father into the back room of the post office to pick up the boxes of books shipped from as far off as Australia. ‘I felt like the king of the world, entering that bustling nerve center of the post office,’ Mohr says.
He got more involved in his parents’ business as a teenager attending Palisades High School. After school he helped catalog his father’s holdings, print labels and wrap books to be shipped to customers. He began to understand that his parents worked all the time but it didn’t feel like work to them.
‘My father’s motto was, ‘You name it, we’ll find it’,’ Mohr says. Family vacations were road trips planned around visits to libraries, book fairs and the homes of private collectors. Mohr kept up correspondence with book dealers around the world and mailed catalogs of his holdings to hundreds of clients.
‘Today there are databases where you can find 10 versions of the book you are looking for, choose the quality, choose the edition, choose whether it is autographed or not,’ Mohr says. ‘But when I was a kid, people waited weeks or months for my dad to find the book they wanted. Everything came and went through the Palisades post office.’
Without a storefront or warehouse, it was hard to keep things in order at the Mohr house. ‘There were books everywhere,’ Mohr recalls. ‘It wasn’t a book store but it might as well have been.’
Mohr’s father closed his business in the early1990s after developing heart disease. When Richard Mohr died his wife Martha’s health declined and she died in 2006.
‘As much as I would have liked to keep Post Office Box One for sentimental reason,’ Mohr says, ‘it was time to find a new owner.’
‘We do like the continuation,’ says Friends president Alice Inglis about the literary history of Box One. ‘The connection with books is nice.’
Mohr keeps one special memento of his parents’ business, at his home in Spokane, where he lives with his wife and two children. He owns the original metal door with a combination lock and glass window that opened onto the original Box One.
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