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Booksmith

1976 establishments in CaliforniaBookstores in the San Francisco Bay AreaBuildings and structures in San FranciscoCompanies based in San FranciscoHaight-Ashbury, San Francisco
Independent bookstores of the United StatesRetail buildings in CaliforniaRetail companies established in 1976
Booksmith in June 2011
Booksmith in June 2011

The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. When first opened in October 1976, the store was located at 1746 Haight Street, below the former I-Beam nightclub. In 1985, the store moved to its current location at 1644 Haight Street at Belvedere, about a block and a half from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury. Other neighborhood businesses include the Persian Aub Zam-Zam, Recycled Records, Amoeba Music, and Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. Also located nearby is the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. The Booksmith caters to neighborhood residents as well as tourists seeking the counter-cultural ambiance of Haight Street. The Booksmith is general interest shop, and is a member of both the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) and the American Booksellers Association (ABA). In June 2007, The Booksmith was sold by its founder Gary Frank to married couple Christin Evans and Praveen Madan. The original business was closed, and a new business, Haight Booksmith LLC, opened in its place. According to media reports at the time, the new owners plan to take the store in a different direction.In May 2011, SF Weekly in its "Best of San Francisco" issue named Booksmith the city's "Best Reimagined Bookstore". Describing the changes to the bookstore, "The new owners gutted the clogged entranceway, feng shui-ed the interior, and gave it a cool Victorian steampunk black-and-teal paint job... with more than 200 in-store author readings a year, Booksmith is more of a literary mecca than ever."

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Booksmith (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Booksmith
Haight Street, San Francisco

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Wikipedia: BooksmithContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 37.769722222222 ° E -122.44944444444 °
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Address

Haight Street 1650;1652;1654
94117 San Francisco
California, United States
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Booksmith in June 2011
Booksmith in June 2011
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Bound Together
Bound Together

Bound Together is an anarchist bookstore and visitor attraction on Haight Street in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Its Lonely Planet review in 2016, commenting on its multiple activities, states that it "makes us tools of the state look like slackers". The bookstore carries new and used books as well as local authors.The bookstore is run by a volunteer collective that includes "lifers" who have held shifts there for decades. Bound Together coordinated the first Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair in 1995. It sends books to jails through the Prisoners' Literature Project. A mural outside the bookshop, originally painted in the 1990s by Susan Greene and periodically updated, is titled Anarchists of the Americas and depicts American anarchists including Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, and Sacco and Vanzetti, as well as a member's cats. Members of the collective may if they choose put out a chalked sign with a slogan when they are working in the store, and the interior is papered with old posters.It was founded as "Bound Together Bookstore" in 1976 in a former drugstore at the corner of Hayes and Ashbury Streets by a collective that included Richard Tetenbaum and Joey Cain. In 1983 it moved to Haight Street and was renamed "Bound Together: An Anarchist Collective Bookstore". Like other small businesses in San Francisco, the collective has been affected by rising costs: their rent increased twelvefold between 1983 and 2004. Bound Together is among the independent bookstores included on the San Francisco Chronicle's 49-Mile Scenic Route.