Bolerium Books

About

Fighting Commodity Fetishism With Commodity Fetishism Since 1981

Story

Bolerium Books specializes in social movements - labor and radical history, African American studies, Hispanics in the US, gay and lesbian studies, Asian American history, and the Spanish Civil War - as well as China studies, and carries a large stock of out-of-print books in other areas as well.

The Bolerium Crew

John Durham, original co-founder: A former graduate student of economics and an activist in the struggle against the Vietnam War and for gay rights, John left school to found Bolerium in 1981. He has a rich background in labor history, with particular emphasis in the Trotskyist movement to which he formerly belonged.

Sue Englander, Ph.D., formerly an editor with the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford, specializes in materials related to the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s movement. She works at Bolerium while teaching US History at San Francisco City College.

Alexander Akin, Ph.D., whose first international trip was a visit to North Korea at the age of 15, first started part-time at Bolerium while finishing a degree in Chinese history at Harvard University. He has taught at Brandeis University and Roxbury Latin School, and is the author of works on East Asian cartography and medieval Islamic numismatics. He has expanded the bookstore’s purview to include Asian language materials, while also serving as cataloguer of materials related to the international labor movement.

Lawrence “Rocky” Heck, active in the book trade since 1975, has also worked in theater organizations in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He is our specialist in Africana, theater, and the arts, with a sideline in early Gay pulp fiction novels.

Jay Kinney, a prominent underground comic artist of the 1970s (Anarchy Comics, Bijou Funnies, etc.) and author of The Masonic Myth (HarperOne, 2009), specializes in underground newspapers and counterculture ephemera. PM Press has published a paperback anthology of Anarchy Comics.

David Park, formerly an independent bookseller, has four decades of experience in the field; he has also run a books-for-prisoners program for more than a decade out of Bolerium’s storeroom.

Joe Marcione studied philosophy at Oberlin College so naturally, after leaving school, he got a job as a dishwasher. In relatively short order, he worked his way up to head chef and spent 10 more or less glorious years in the restaurant business. The '89 quake shook him up enough to give up the high stress, high hours kitchen work and he spent the next 7 years schlepping the masses as an airport shuttle driver. He fell into the rabbit hole of book collecting in the early 1990s and found himself
haunting thrift stores in hopes of finding trade bait to fill out his collection. Hoping to eliminate the middle man, he started selling directly, first through ads and quotes via AB Bookmans Weekly (remember them?), then displaying at Tall Stories (our neighbor down the hallway in the 1990s). With the prescient business instincts of a philosophy major, he opened Valhalla Books (specializing in Modern First Editions) back in 1998 just in time for the Internet driven crash in his chosen specialty. For the past 17 years, he tended to his own store, being sure to ingratiate himself to us via his nearly 24/7 coffee pot. His foresight/addiction paid off and he is now our newest employee, bartering his skills in cataloging, image taking, coffee making and navigating the eBay quagmire for the chance to retire his bookstore debt.