She Got the Hobbit of Reading, and Fiction Became Her Science

When Sherry Gottlieb started reading the Oz books as a child, she was a goner. Her father saw no harm in it. He had a complete set of the L. Frank Baum classics from his own childhood. One by one, he put them on her bed and she devoured them.

When the supply ran out, she went to the public library and consumed all of the fairy tales. All of them.

Today, next to a gasoline station on Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica, Gottlieb runs what may be the largest science fiction book shop in the world, A Change of Hobbit, after J. R. R. Tolkien’s creatures. She keeps a Colombian boa constrictor named Wrinklesnakeskin (after Rumplestiltskin) as a pet, dyes her forelocks purple and generally lives as she pleases.

Consider the snake, for example.

“I’m allergic to cats. I live in a second-floor apartment, which isn’t fair to a dog. Birds are noisy, fish are boring and I hadn’t had a pet in six years when somebody introduced me to a snake. And I said, ‘This is wonderful. I’m not allergic to it. I can leave it for three weeks at a time without having to feed him. He feels nice and he’s wonderful to take to parties.’ I never have to worry about talking to strangers. They all come up and talk to me.”

Besides, he minds his own business, “except he doesn’t have a mind.”

Consider the purple hair.

“I dyed it about a year ago on my 30-mumble birthday. Why? Because I can. Since I don’t have a boss or a husband to tell me I can’t, I have the freedom to have a tattoo or have my hair dyed purple.”

In her one-floor establishment, she has 75,000 books and 4,800 square feet of floor space, which she fills when the likes of an Arthur C. Clarke come to autograph books. She hosts important science fiction writers about 15 times a year.

How did she get from Oz to here?

Not by the whirlwind that more often than not lands one in Kansas. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, between the Free Speech movement and People’s Park. “My olfactory memories of the ‘60s were the smell of tear gas.”

When she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in theater arts-playwrighting, the only jobs she could get were as a secretary or a waitress. She gave in to the secretarial side in a film rental library. Women’s liberation was just blooming and “after two years my mind began to rot from disuse.”

“I quit my job and my then-husband said, ‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ And there was some worry in his voice because he was at the University of Southern California in film school.

“I said, ‘I’m going to read science fiction until I run out of money and then I’m going to worry about it.’ ”

She said she wished there was a science fiction bookstore in Los Angeles like the one she had visited in London. It was called “Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed,” after a line from writer Ray Bradbury.

“And my husband said, looking out the window and thinking of something else, ‘Why don’t you open one up?’

“And I said: ‘Oh, that’s a good idea. I could call it A Change of Hobbit.’ ”

Talk in Dialogue

People who read a lot of novels tend to talk in dialogue.

She copied all the names of publishers from her own collection of paperbacks, wrote to them to order books, found a 12-by-15-foot room over a coin laundry in Westwood Village hard by UCLA, and invested $1,500 in savings.

The owner wouldn’t let her put a sign out front, so it was all word-of-mouth. A local seller of general books put a sign on his science fiction section directing buffs to Gottlieb. She had no telephone for the first five months because she couldn’t afford one.

When she went to get her business license, they asked her how much she expected to make a month. She figured a buck a book and maybe one or two a day, and answered “Fifty dollars?” They asked what her rent was. She said, “Eighty-five.” The clerk shrieked, “How are you going to cover it?” Gottlieb shrugged wide-eyed and said, “I dunno. I’ll type term papers.”

Every time she sold a book, she would reorder. She had only one copy of everything.

She knows now that even as proprietor of the world’s largest and oldest, she’ll never get rich, maybe never even be able to buy a home. But she enjoys.

As for her lawyer-father, the childhood Oz buff who created Sherry, he had wanted a lawyer in his family. It wasn’t Sherry. Another daughter rose to the occasion. From a liberal second-generation California family of conservative life style, Sherry goes her own way.

Indoor Gazebo

She sits in an indoor gazebo in a corner in front of a replica of Flash Gordon’s radio where she chats with friends. She has six employees, aided and abetted by volunteer science fiction buffs. Her customers are varied--scientists, mothers with children browsing through the fantasy section, and a few eccentrics. The children are sometimes given Wrinklesnakeskin to cuddle. One customer named Bongo Wolf came in for years wearing a bow tie, a four-in-hand and a noose.

Gottlieb finds time to talk to most. In her spare time, she is putting together an oral history on Vietnam draft evaders. She thinks their story should be told.

In the meantime, business purrs along smoothly at A Change of Hobbit, which she says inherited its ranking of largest and oldest (established 1972) when the London bookstore folded a couple of years back. Science fiction bookstores are locked in grim competition with the chains, and Publisher’s Weekly says there are only 20 or so in business in the United States, almost all in large cities.

The measure of success seems to be the breadth of selection. Gottlieb offers a wide range and a mail-order business as well as a newsletter.

She has fashioned a notion of the speculative fiction genre from her own ideas and those of others.

“Science fiction--never SciFi--is the thing that could happen, but hasn’t. Fantasy is the thing that couldn’t happen but you wish it would. And horror is the thing you are afraid will happen, but thank God it won’t.”