An unassuming new corner bookstore burrowed into a sidewalk of Oakland’s Adams Point neighborhood has a dramatic origin story and surprising ambitions — the visitors, its owner says, are meant to “experience the timeline of human civilization.”
Indeed, the arrangement of titles at Clio’s Bookstore and Bar traces the entirety of human history, an experiment in curation that demands far more thoughtfulness than simple alphabetical order.
But literary industry veteran Timothy Don said he holds the whole tapestry together in his head — one of his many aspirations for a bookstore that is relying almost entirely on word-of-mouth buzz among a community of Bay Area residents aching to reclaim an analog life.
“We don’t want people looking at their phones in here,” Don said proudly, gesturing around at his warmly lit enclave. “We want them to be in conversation, with the books and with each other.”
Clio’s offers an academic’s understanding of history, spanning everything from ancient literature to that of the past century, each section offering not just the texts written in a given period but later-published works that attempted to re-contextualize what that moment felt like.
To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, appears in both the 1960s and 1930s sections — respectively, when it was published and when it is set — so the books, too, are in conversation with time. When one copy is purchased, Don will know where to shelve its replacement.
The small shop is an urban intellectual’s daydream: there’s ample space for literary speaking events; a few chessboard tables; a secret nook that serves as a children’s section, a tasteful cocktail bar with affordable drinks; small-plate entrées on the horizon.
A view of the bar area at Clio’s Bookstore and Bar in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, February 15, 2024. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
But in a city where restaurants, bars and other businesses have struggled to remain afloat amid sky-high rent prices, Don’s bookstore is also a gamble against a retail bookselling industry with delicate margins.
Some Bay Area bookstores, such as Walden Pond (founded 1973) down the street from Clio’s on Grand Avenue, Kepler’s in Menlo Park (founded 1955) and City Lights in San Francisco (founded 1953) are so beloved that they’ve become local institutions.
In other cities, retail storefronts have struggled to survive off selling text — a few months after Barnes and Noble reopened a location in Walnut Creek, neighboring independent seller Flashlight Books closed its doors, citing lease issues. Bel and Bunna Books in Lafayette met the same fate later that year, having fallen behind on rent.
But the Bay Area remains one of the top markets for bookselling in the country. The independent Bay Area chain Books Inc., for instance, has continued to grow even through the pandemic, and now has 11 locations, including a Pruneyard store in Campbell that opened in 2018 and one in San Leandro that opened in 2022. Hicklebee’s, an indie children’s bookstore in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood, was founded in 1979, and over more than four decades has earned a national reputation for bringing marquee children’s authors to the South Bay. It got a new owner last year.
Even Shoshanna Smith, a cofounder of Flashlight Books, has hope for bookstores here.
“I don’t feel as cynical about the industry as maybe I even should,” Smith said in a recent interview, one year after the closure. “Bookstores are such special places in communities. But there is an inherent struggle in finding your niche.”
Don, who has worked at literary magazine Lapham’s Quarterly since its inception in the 1990s, is aware of the challenges around retail — especially for a store that intends to forego promoting itself on social media entirely. It will, however, offer online sales.
For now, the Oakland resident believes Clio’s can provide an oasis to people craving a communal space, perhaps before or after a walk at nearby Lake Merritt.
“We solicited investments from several people who are very generous,” he explained, adding that the store’s curatorial board helped ensure a diverse, global selection of books. “But we really are doing this on our own. Our goal is to keep costs low.”
Patrons socialize at Clio’s Bookstore and Bar in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, February 15, 2024. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
His faith in public support is nothing new; Don and his wife formed the now-defunct Oakland Book Festival in the 2010s that allowed guests to attend for free.
To borrow a term from an introductory college lecture, it is the ethos of Clio’s that fuels Don — the idea that time is experienced collectively, and that history shapes people as much as the other way around.
The idea might just extend to the store itself, which sits below several floors of apartments and amid a cluster of restaurants, bars and shops at the corner of Grand Avenue and Perkins Street in Oakland’s Adams Point neighborhood.
Nearly two years ago, it was the site of chaos when a siren-sounding fire engine crashed into the building’s ground floor after swerving away from a car that had entered the intersection.
The firetruck busted the water main, forcing the upstairs tenants to temporarily evacuate, and remained pinned there for several hours — an ordeal that significantly delayed Clio’s originally planned opening.
OAKLAND, CA – FEBRUARY 26: An Oakland fire engine truck crashed on a residential building at the corner of Grand Avenue and Perkins Street in Oakland, Calif., while en route to respond to a fire structure on Saturday, Feb. 26, 2002. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
The sight was not out of place in a town where public safety seems to be at the top of everyone’s minds, and where calamity often dominates both local and national headlines.
Now there is a new space where the lobby once stood, its steward eager to help shape the next chapter of Oakland’s history.
Clio’s currently bears few signifiers that it belongs to Oakland or the Bay Area — at the moment, it might be mistaken for a shop plucked out of Portland or Cambridge. But Don is working on a section that will be dedicated entirely to California authors.
The store plans to expand its hours, building off what has thus far been its bread-and-butter: speaking events, including one last week with local author Lauren Markham, who is promoting a new book.
“Everywhere you walk into feels like every other place you’ve been,” Markham, who resides in Berkeley, said in an interview. “Clio’s feels like a place unto itself; it’s a cozy vibrant bookstore, meets bar, meets café, meets European artist spot… this is a really exciting time for books.”
