The last used hardcover bookstore west of the 405 (say the owners) is closing soon. Jerry and Rose Blaz opened The BOOKie Joint in 1975 in the heart of Reseda at 7248 Reseda Boulevard. He talks about the store at ValleyNews.com:

in those days, Reseda may not have been the most "upscale" shopping area either. I recall the manager of the Reseda Chamber of Commerce coming to meet me, and complaining about the lack of development in the Reseda business area, and blamed this lack of development on the failure years before to support the building of a shopping mall in Reseda, which later was built instead in Northridge, and is known today as the Northridge Shopping Mall on Tampa between Nordhoff and Plummer.

Nevertheless, there was a working class vitality to the Reseda area. We soon found that we had to advertise in phone books from the South Bay to Ventura and the Conejo Valley to Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley to Pasadena, but we developed a loyal clientele of people from the immediate area to much of Southern California.

[snip]

The intrepid performer Gary Owens has been one of our most faithful customers. He keeps looking for humor in old books. I recall him crawling around on his hands and knees because we had a collection down on the floor in which he was interested; he is a real fan of humor, and we're convinced he will do almost anything to get good material.

Two members of the Seinfeld show have been customers of the BOOKie Joint, Michael Richards (Kramer) at a time before he had the Seinfeld gig, and Julia-Louis Dreyfus after the series had finished making new episodes.

For years the BOOKie Joint carried many books on the Vietnam war, but there wasn't much interest in a war that people seemed to want to forget. Then one day a young man came into the shop and asked for books on the Vietnam War, and found some. I later recognized him in photos when the movie "Platoon" was released; he was Oliver Stone. Since then, Vietnam became a viable topic for books, and I've had a difficult time keeping them in stock.

When they finally reopened after the Northridge earthquake, the Blaz's had t-shirts printed up for community volunteers that read "I stacked a million books at The BOOKie Joint after the 1994 earthquake."

My BOOKie Joint.com