A things to do near me search in downtown Los Angeles keeps returning one address on Spring Street, and it is a bookshop. The Last Bookstore occupies the ground floor and mezzanine of a 1915 bank building, and the reason it appears on every list is a set of installations upstairs built out of books, including an arch you can walk through.
The upstairs labyrinth and the ground floor are effectively two different visits, and one of them empties out by late afternoon. Ask Karpo how busy the Last Bookstore is right now and what else is free nearby.
It was a bank
The building is the former Crocker National Bank at Fifth and Spring, built in 1915 in the era when Spring Street was called the Wall Street of the West and lined with financial institutions competing on the grandeur of their banking halls.
What survives is the scale: enormous marble columns, a coffered ceiling, a vast open floor. Bookshelves in a room built for a banking hall look absurd in a way that works, and the old vault is still in the building, now used as a room for horror and crime sections.
Spring Street's bank buildings mostly emptied out in the second half of the twentieth century as business moved west. The adaptive reuse of these buildings, into lofts, hotels, bars and this bookshop, is the main story of downtown Los Angeles over the past twenty-five years.
The book tunnel and the labyrinth
Upstairs on the mezzanine is a section usually called the Labyrinth, where over a hundred thousand books are shelved at a flat low price and arranged in a sprawl of rooms. Within it are the installations: an arch built from books, a tunnel you can walk through, shelves curling into spirals, books fanned across walls.
It is genuinely a good photograph and that is why the crowds come, but the more interesting thing is that the books in the labyrinth are all for sale at the same low price regardless of title, which makes browsing a completely different activity from browsing a normal shop.
There are also artist studios and small shops on the mezzanine level, which rotate. It is worth a look even if you are not buying.
What it is like as a bookshop
Underneath the installations it is a large, serious used and new bookshop with a broad general stock, a substantial vinyl section and a horror room in the vault. The staff recommendations are genuine rather than publisher-driven, which is increasingly rare.
If you are actually shopping rather than sightseeing, the ground floor is where the curated stock lives and the labyrinth is where you dig. Both are worth time, but they are different activities.
There are events, readings and signings regularly, and they are a considerably better way to see the room than a weekend afternoon when it is full.
When to go
Weekend afternoons are the peak and the upstairs installations have a queue for photographs. A weekday morning shortly after opening is a different building: quiet, echoing, and much easier to look at properly.
Late afternoon on a weekday is the second-best window. Avoid Saturday between midday and four unless the crowd is part of what you came for.
What the name means
The shop opened in 2005 as an online operation before taking physical space, and the name is a deliberately morbid joke about the state of bookselling at the time, when Amazon and the collapse of the chains had closed a very large number of American bookshops.
Twenty years later the joke has aged into something else, because independent bookselling in the United States has partially recovered and this shop is among the largest of them. The name now reads less as a prediction than as a marker of how bad things looked.
Downtown around it
Fifth and Spring is in the Historic Core, a compact grid of early twentieth century buildings that is genuinely walkable. Grand Central Market is four blocks northwest, the Bradbury Building with its cast-iron atrium is directly across from it, and the Los Angeles Central Library is a few blocks west.
All of those are free or nearly free to enter, which makes this a rare part of Los Angeles where you can spend a half day on foot without paying admission to anything. Pershing Square Metro station is three blocks away.
Parking downtown is expensive and the streets are congested; the Metro is faster and cheaper from most parts of the city.
Practical notes
Address: 453 South Spring Street, Los Angeles, at Fifth in the Historic Core. Free entry, open daily; confirm current hours. The mezzanine level and the vault are both open to browse without buying anything.
Go on a weekday morning if you want the room to yourself, start upstairs before the crowd arrives, look at the vault and the ceiling as well as the book arch, and walk to the Bradbury Building and Grand Central Market afterwards. Take the Metro to Pershing Square rather than driving.
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know how busy the Last Bookstore is right now, whether there is an event on tonight, and what else nearby is free? Ask Karpo for today's hours, the quietest hour to visit, and a walking route to the Bradbury Building.
