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“We wanted an actual physical space,” he added. “We could never have done Family without the
Internet, but on the Internet you never get that powerful feeling of people coming together in a
space.”
What people increasingly want from a bookstore, Mr. Kramer suggested, and possibly also from
all sorts of retailing experiences, is “the feeling there’s a human being behind what’s being
offered to them.” It is not about the materials, in other words, but who is using them.
And that is seemingly why what one writer there neatly characterized as a “bookstore that takes
everything fun and nice you could ever imagine about Los Angeles, detaches it from the
contiguous horde of leather-faced ego-monsters and focuses it all in a space of several hundred
square feet” became a must-see cultural destination in 36 months.
And that may also be why, out of nowhere and with no formal training or industry contacts or
particular preconceptions about bookselling, the men behind the Family managed to attract the
attention first of Spike Jonze, the movie director, and through him the advertising wizards at
TBWA/Chiat/Day and through them the money people at Absolut vodka, who fronted Family a
sum roughly equivalent to the price of a Manhattan studio to set up the shop in New York for a
month.
“If you go to Borders, it feels cold and isolating and not only because the layout looks like an
airport toilet,” Mr. Kramer said.
Family, by contrast, feels cool and inviting, partly because the space evokes the kind of
wonderful artist-run dumps that were plentiful in TriBeCa before developers hijacked the area
and transformed it into a residential Gold Coast for hedge fund millionaires.
At mainstream stores, Mr. Kramer said, “You’re aware all the time that you’re being marketed at,
rather than being shown the stuff that the people who run it love.”
And what do the folks at Family love at this particular nanosecond They love the influential and
semi-obscure crime writer Charles Willeford. They love the skateboarder artist Ed Templeton.
They love Sergio Aragones, the artist who drew marginalia for Mad Magazine; and also the
photographer and blogger Cali Dewitt and his wife, the punk rock vocalist Jenna Thornhill; and
the filmmaker Albert Maysles; and reissued classics from the New York Review of Books; and
noise music made by a 17-year-old musician in his Los Angeles bedroom; and the Zurich-based
art zine publisher Nieves; and photo books from the shape-shifting Kansas City artist Jaimie