It’s over for Cliff’s, Pasadena used book store’s sales fall off

A landmark on East Colorado Boulevard will close its doors this week.

Cliff’s Books, one of the few remaining used bookstores in Pasadena, is going out of business.

“It wasn’t unexpected. They had their 50 percent-off sale for a year, but I was still in shock seeing it,” said Mike Callahan, of Hollywood, who was browsing the shelves one last time Monday afternoon.

Jerry Lang, who has worked at the store for about 16 years, said he, too, wasn’t surprised at the news his boss Cliff Gildart would close the store.

“From my perspective, I was amazed at how long we lasted,” he said.

Older businesses in the Playhouse District have had to contend with rising rents and the addition of condominiums, the movie theatre and big-box stores.

A place like Cliff’s, where books are piled on shelves of unfinished wood and hand-written signs direct customers to the back of the store to offerings on Eastern and Western philosophy, for example, have become more and more rare.

Pasadena Heritage member Christle Balvin said since the Playhouse District has become the city’s arts district, there should be an area where rents are affordable so that places like artists’ studios and used bookstores can survive.

“If we drive them out with new development, we are driving out amenities that many people are seeking,” she said.

Mike Cesnero pointed to the 2008 closure of Bungalow News, a newsstand down the street from Cliff’s that sold newspapers and magazines from around the globe, as another sign of the difficulty that similar businesses face.

“It’s a very digital age, I guess,” he said as he looked through magazines. “It’s very sad.”

Lang said Cliff’s which has been struggling for the past five years, is closing due to a combination of factors.

“A brick and mortar used bookstore, they must have a huge online presence in order to survive,” said Lang. “We didn’t. We don’t. Cliff never wanted to.”

He said the task of cataloging the shop’s approximately 150,000 books was too daunting for Gildart. And he said Gildart never wanted to be in the “mail order business,” which many used booksellers rely on for cashflow.

The economic downturn of 2008 also hurt business, he said, and the store was slow to adjust prices.

The proliferation of buying books on the internet also contributed to Cliff’s demise.

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“It’s so convenient,” he said. “Once you start down the road where you don’t ever have to leave your house, you click a couple buttons and three days later, it’s on your doorstep.”

Lang said he will miss the “characters” who stumbled their way into Cliff’s, which was open until midnight.

“It was an ongoing zoo in this place,” he said. “These places attract eccentric folk. There was no dearth of eccentric folk on a regular basis.”

Callahan, who works as an environmental engineer, said Cliff’s was a treasure for technical books, which would make their way to the shelves of the book shop from nearby Caltech. He said sites like Amazon are no replacement for Cliff’s.

“A lot of the stuff I buy I don’t know what I’m looking for until I find it,” he said. “You go online and you just see a title and you really have to handle the book and look through it to see if it’s really worth buying or not.”
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