On his first trip to San Francisco in 1987, Grant Faulkner "had only one thing on my list. A friend told me that if I did just one thing in San Francisco, I had to go to City Lights (261 Columbus Avenue), a bookstore and publishing house owned by the doyen of the Beats, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I'd never be quite the same again." Faulkner, executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story, wrote about the Bay Area's "love affair with the roguish spirit of the Bay Area and its literary tribes of misfits, dropouts, and seekers" for Poets & Writers magazine.
Among the many highlights of the region, he singled out the Bay Area's "flowering garden of bookstores with distinct personalities," including Dog Eared Books ("the type of bookstore where you never know what you're going to find"), Borderlands ("you'll often see a group of people writing assiduously in a Shut Up & Write meetup there"), Green Apple ("looks upon the Richmond district like an avidly curious and beloved kooky professor"), the Booksmith ("offers comfy browsing in the Haight") and Bound Together Bookstore (where "the old San Francisco anarchist spirit is alive and well"). In Berkeley, Faulkner highlighted the Pegasus stores ("I spend many hours combing the shelves for biblio surprises as my kids roam the children's section") and Moe's Books ("a venerable indie institution since 1959").
Faulkner conceded that it's "impossible to name all of my favorites," before adding to the list Mrs. Dalloway's ("could be cast as the charming community bookstore in a movie"), Books Inc. ("hosts an overflowing calendar of readings and a number of cool programs for kids"), Book Passage ("which probably hosts the most author events and classes in the Bay Area"), Kepler's ("with its dedicated staff of book lovers") and Castle in the Air ("my favorite place for sumptuous journals and whimsical, fantasy writing supplies").