The first time I crossed the smoked glass threshold of Kayo Books at 907 Post St., I immediately thought of the 1959 Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough At Last.”
Even if you haven’t seen this particular installment, you probably know it from references on The Simpsons and Family Guy or from Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Based on a short story by Lynn Venable, who died last year in El Cerrito at the age of 97, the episode was written by Rod Serling and tells the story of a nebbish named Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith), who only wants to spend his time reading; after he manages to survive an H-bomb that killed everyone else on earth, Bemis can finally read to his heart’s content. If it weren’t for gravity and his stupid non-shatterproof glasses.
Wiping down my own thankfully shatterproof glasses (it was raining), I took in Kayo’s teeming shelves and displays of pulp novels, genre paperbacks, underground comics, art books, vintage magazines, and everything else I would need to pass my time until the end of the world.
While I’m sure there are a few respectable titles somewhere in this very full yet airy store, I didn’t spot a single one. Instead, I browsed books with titles like Pay for Her Passion, racks of paperbacks about sexy nurses (the sort Richard Prince painted in the early 2000s), and so many others in the genre that Joan Didion once dismissively called “all the paperbacks with chained girls on the cover.”
These books, by all rights, should no longer exist. Written on assembly lines by writers using pseudonyms, they were published as cheaply as possible by companies operating out of rat traps and read surreptitiously, meant to be disposed of at a moment’s notice. These books are no one’s idea of enduring literature, and still, here they are.
Also still here are Maria Mendoza and Ron Blum, the married team who’ve owned and operated Kayo for the last 29 years. They opened the store at a smaller, less polished location on Polk that Blum described as “a sliver,” mostly as a place to put his personal collection of mystery, sci-fi, and other pulp novels he’d bought at places like the Marin City Flea Market. That was shortly before the birth of their son. “We had all the shit in our apartment,” said Mendoza, sounding actually kind of wistful for those days. That sliver seemed like a good place to park — maybe even sell — some of that shit.
Now they work out of a beautiful, renovated space with a mezzanine and a basement. They’ve had three store dogs, the latest, Pip, a black dog with white in her muzzle. Their son is now a grown man who sends his parents pictures of paperbacks he spots in the wild. “It’s not like he wants to collect,” said Blum, “but he appreciates it.”
Kayo has also grown up, becoming a singular outpost of underground or outré 20th-century books and periodicals with sales all over the world, thanks to eBay and their own website.
“People used to read for entertainment,” Mendoza told me as we carefully thumbed through copies of Amazing Stories, a science fiction magazine from the 1920s, their covers still bright and grabby. (One from September 1927 featured an illustration by Frank Paul of a soldier being pulled into a giant carnivorous flower.) “Now entertainment is Instagram or whatever it is.”
Like the books they sell, the collectors of old pulps are fading. Over the decades, Blum and Mendoza have seen many of their most avid customers — the sort of people who kept binders of the editions they sought or who wanted numbered, sequential titles to complete a series — die off.
“When we opened up the store, I had the thought in my mind, like, How many years does it take for a book to come back to us?” Mendoza mused. “And so, I figured it out: 25 years. We got a couple books and there was a notation that we put in there. It’s come back home!”
That is, until Kayo sells it to the next collector. Or, more likely, the last, especially if the world ends thanks to any number of the eventualities playing out like the fevered imagining of a pulp writer on deadline.
“It’s a search for immortality that you’re never going to achieve,” Blum said of collecting. “Maybe your collection will survive after you’re gone and maybe not.”
