Best Bookstore — Westside in Los Angeles: Sideshow Rare Books, Art & Curiosities

Sideshow Rare Books, Art & Curiosities

11323 Idaho Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90025

(310) 428-4631

This is the kind of bookstore you'd open yourself if you had the chance. Owner Tony Jacobs' labor of love, Sideshow Rare Books, Art & Curiosities, is a packed and compact used-book store festooned with hefty art books, ringed with underground comix and Mad Magazine paperbacks, and filled to capacity with more stars than there are in the literary heavens. Just around the corner from the Nuart Theatre and the new record store Touch Vinyl, the 2-year-old shop completes a much-needed trifecta of exploration — bookstore, cinema, record store — necessary for any neighborhood at its cultural finest. There's even a nook inside Sideshow with a little black-and-white TV playing Humphrey Bogart movies on an infinite loop. Novelist Robertson Davies once wrote, "To be a book collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser." Sideshow Books combines the absolute best things of life in one sprawling, literally wonderful little space — fiends and misers notwithstanding. 11323 Idaho Ave., W.L.A. (310) 428-4631, sideshowbooks.tumblr.com. —David Cotner

Source: LA Weekly