There are a few reason why I think I would enjoy living in Los Angeles. FAMILY bookstore is one of them.

Family
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323-782-9221
www.familylosangeles.com

(This article originally appeared on STOP SMILING Online)

The owners of Family bookstore in Los Angeles curate their inventory according to a strict standard of awesomeness: Each hand-picked item must abide by select criteria to earn placement on the store’s shelves: “The book itself has to be an elegant object,” says Family co-owner David Jacob Kramer. “Even if there’s an author I really like, and I think should be in the store, if their book cover is really pedestrian and thoughtless, then I don’t want to carry it. I really believe that the form that literature comes in is just as important as the content. The form is the content.”

Family began in late 2006 after three Australian transplants — Kramer, Sammy Harkham and his wife, Tahli — rented a storefront on Fairfax Avenue and transformed it into something of a tribute to their adolescent selves.

“We have a lot of in-store shows here,” Kramer says, “and when we were teenagers those were the only shows we could go to. And just the experience as a teenager of going into a record or bookstore, you were discovering stuff that would radically change your perception of the world.”

Family events are not meant to sell books as much as generate an element of energy and excitement about the space. “You want the place to be alive,” Kramer says, “something that lives and breathes, not just a place where people come to buy stuff.”

Their traditional literary happenings, which have included a reading series curated by LA author Trinie Dalton and a number of events in conjunction with McSweeney’s, fit seamlessly into a docket of events alongside concerts by groups like No Age and Ariel Pink. Family also works in tandem with the Hope Gallery for art exhibitions, and with the Silent Movie Theatre, where Kramer and Harkham program the film series CineFamily.

While the old warhorses of the book business wring their hands trying to come up with solutions to save print publishing in the era of the Web, the Family staff, from top to bottom, is native to the Internet age. “The Internet has really made a store like ours possible,” Kramer says, “because with it you can discover a publisher in Switzerland or a publisher in Japan, you can email them out of the blue, put in your order, PayPal them their money and a week later you have these books, and you’re the only stockers in America. Fifty years ago you would have to go to Switzerland and stumble into this store, but now you can find it on the Internet and get an order into your store in a week.”

Among the international rarities Family offers are selections from Nieves, a Swiss publisher of art books and zines like The Times they are the Changes and Chapter 3, as well as mono.kultur, a handsome interview zine from Berlin, and There Stands the Glass from Australia’s Serps Press. Other books that are particularly emblematic of the Family vision include the new two-volume Gary Panter retrospective, photographer Peter Sutherland’s Muddy Treads, conceptual artist Lawrence Winer’s children’s book Something to Put Something On, Ian Svenonius’ The Psychic Soviet and Emmett Grogan’s autobiography, Ringolevio. Each of these books is a complete unit: aesthetically astute, well conceived and highly conceptualized. As long as books are “elegant objects,” Kramer says, they will remain irreplaceable by an electronic screen.

The undertaking of opening Family has already fulfilled the hopes of its founders; they have been able to stay in business without compromising their curatorial vision.

“I was so terrified before we opened,” Kramer says, “because the idea of the store — the concept of it — was kind of novel. I’d never really seen a store with this idea, so I didn’t know if it was even feasible. But we opened, and we’re still open. Not only that, but the stuff that sells well is the stuff we really love. It was gratifying to see that, and it meant that we could really go for it and indulge ourselves. We have a lot of people working here now, and it’s all kind of just us kids doing it. So as long as we can stay afloat, I’m pretty proud of ourselves.”