The Book Den corner

One of California's oldest used bookstores, on a corner of library, museum and books.

Key facts

The Book Den: founded in Oakland in 1902, on this street since 1933, one of California's oldest used bookstores
Faces the Santa Barbara Public Library's Carnegie-era central branch, opened 1917
Santa Barbara Museum of Art opened nearby in 1941 inside a former 1912 post office
Bookstore, library and museum make this downtown's civic-culture corner

Narration transcript

Turn the corner onto Anapamu Street and slow down, because this modest block does a lot of quiet work. On one side, the Book Den — a used bookshop that's been trading since 1902, when it opened up in Oakland, and here in Santa Barbara since 1933. That makes it one of the oldest used bookstores in all of California. Not a museum piece — a working shop, full of secondhand and rare books, still doing exactly what it did ninety-odd years ago.

Now turn your head. Across the street is the central Public Library, a Carnegie library that opened in 1917 — one of the genuinely old survivors on this walk, older than most of the "old town." And just back toward State Street is the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which opened in 1941 inside what used to be the town's post office.

So on one corner you've got books, a library, and an art museum — the reading, lending and looking of a small city, stacked up in three doorways. This is the tour's whole idea in miniature: specialty shops and civic landmarks aren't two different subjects here. They grew up on the same blocks, in the same decades, chasing the same idea of what a cultured little Spanish city should be.

Browse if you like — then come back to State Street and continue downhill. A short block down on your right, watch for a shaded archway leading off the sidewalk into a courtyard. That's La Arcada.