By MATTHEW MEYER | Reporter
Tucked away off a side street in West Los Angeles, there’s an 800-square-foot, standalone building stuffed to the brim with books. A faded green awning covers a couple rollaway carts outside, lined with cheap paperbacks labeled “Cool Books.” A sandwich board sign—the wood papered with pages from different novels—sits on the sidewalk declaring its destination, full name: Sideshow Rare & Remarkable Books, Art & Curiosities.
Inside, shelves stretch from floor to ceiling in every direction. Chinese lanterns and strings of exposed bulbs criss-cross the entrance in a sort of disjointed canopy. They cast light on the tapestries and trinkets—plastic robot here, obscure board game there—that fill any remaining bits of space.
Books are everywhere. Lining the shelves, yes, but also spilling forth from cabinets, balancing in precarious stacks, filling crates on side-tables and being brandished in the hands of a punk rocker type who’s talking philosophy with a dazed companion. Laminated signs divide the reading material into semi-orderly sections—from such stalwarts as horror and history to such niche fare as UFO and Wiccan lit.
The smell of books permeates the air. It’s not that sterile, Barnes & Noble aroma, either. There’s something more intimate about the smell, like the stacks of an old local library.
At the center of it all stands Palisadian Tony Jacobs, cup of coffee in hand, Cleveland Indians cap on his head. “Sideshow” is his eclectic creation, the product of a lifelong love affair with books and art.
“I think the book thing definitely came out of my childhood,” Jacobs told the Palisadian–Post. “I have fond memories of exploring estate sales [for books] with my mom. And I was also really intrigued by my mom’s childhood.”
Interest in his mother’s youth drew Jacobs to women’s literature—a burgeoning genre during her younger years—as the two combed for bargains around Cleveland, Ohio, where Jacobs was born and raised.
During the 1930s and ’40s, the rise of paperback books allowed women’s lit to blossom, characterized by splashy, stylized covers and filled with tales about the plight of the average woman. Jacobs became lost in the world of these books from his mother’s past, ones he called “a window into her experience growing up.”
“I was really intrigued by this forgotten literature,” he said. “That was a lot of stuff written that was never intended to be saved.”
But Jacobs did save the books, in a collection that steadily grew as he eventually left home for Rhode Island to attend Brown University. He viewed the lit as inspiration for telling his own stories through film, a medium that he studied and explored in his time at Brown. After school he moved to New York, working on independent features and children’s programming. All the while, his collection of books grew.
Eventually, Jacobs moved to LA to work on features as a storyboard artist. By now he had a wife and three sons. That and box upon box of books, an “enormous amount” that was starting to stretch the limits of his storage (and the patience of his family).
Jacobs started selling the volumes online, often more than pleasantly surprised at the value his longtime possessions held on the market. The more he sold, the more he found around LA, his eye for a good deal on vintage paperbacks and other collector books still as keen as ever.
“I was finding incredible troves of rare books, and I was flipping them because I didn’t have the room for them,” Jacobs explained.
Meanwhile, the film industry was less kind. Jacobs realized that instead of working nearly all day, every day at the studio, he could work better hours and spend more time with his family by collecting and selling books full-time.
“I just preferred the idea that I could be around for my family—present them with perhaps a better model for how to get by in life,” he told the Post.
Though he kept his business online at first, Jacobs dreamed of creating a physical space to explore and discover books the way he always had. When he was forced to move his operation to a larger building to accommodate inventory, Jacobs finally moved into Sideshow’s current location, near Santa Monica Boulevard in West LA.
“I found this space, which I’d always driven past and enjoyed fantasizing about,” he said. “It’s one little building in the middle of … kind of nowhere. It’s contained. And apparently it had been on the market to rent for almost a year.”
There, Jacobs built a playground for readers to navigate. For customers, the very process of searching for material in the store’s bulging shelves becomes part of their next literary experience.
“It’s a journey,” Jacobs said of finding a great book. “So I try to reward the journey. Hunting, searching, looking will be rewarded.”
Hunters, searchers and lookers won’t be disappointed. Buried in the shelves of Sideshow’s film section is the “world’s smallest movie theater,” a tiny DVD player and screen that’s played “The Big Sleep” on a loop for most of the seven years the store’s been open. In the science fiction section, a space between two shelves contains what looks like a portal to outer space.
For Jacobs, it’s these little gems that make shopping for books in person so much more of “a rich cultural experience” than finding them online. Though e-commerce remains a vital part of his business model, Sideshow’s online customers are simply missing out on a crucial piece of what the store’s owner has built.
So is the Palisades, where Jacobs has made his home west of the Village for the last five years. He’s long hoped to revive the space where Village Books once stood—a beloved community shop off Swarthmore Avenue that closed in 2011—but was never able to secure the space.
So, for now, Palisadians will need to make the short trip down to West LA to explore all that Sideshow has to offer. The journey is sure to be worth it.
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