ICONS

Book Soup aside, L.A. has an unfortunate reputation for indifference to the written word (with the obvious exception of those three little ones-- script , treatment and contract ). Most entrepreneurs would open a lemon-grass-juice boutique before they would consider the newsstand business. This isn’t New York, after all. But Allan Brooks knows better. He is Al of the Al’s Newsstands that dot the city. He sells only magazines and newspapers--no creme brulee, no decaf iced cappuccino--just stuff to read. Amazingly enough, it pays the rent, and in some of the pricier neighborhoods, too.

In 1975, Al, now 49, bought the first stand--on Fairfax Avenue near Canter’s--from a friend. Al was tired of selling advertising over the phone. Mostly, he was tired of the phone; he wanted a sense of community. His friend, he says, “would walk down the street and know everyone.” That’s what Al wanted, and that’s what Al got.

Running the one outfit was enough for a while. Then, three years ago, Al got the itch to expand, to start a chain of what he calls “the cleanest, nicest, friendliest newsstands.” In quick succession, he opened a stand on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, one on the Santa Monica Promenade and a third in the Malibu Colony Plaza. He plans to open several more in the next few years, but his first priority is to computerize so that “I’m not doing all the ordering just out of my head.”

Now Al drives from stand to stand (in a minivan with a license plate that reads “ALS NEWS”) monitoring which of the nearly 1,200 titles are moving and which are falling flat. In Santa Monica, New Age journals tend to sell; on Fairfax, car magazines. At the Beverly Hills stand, nothing is more popular than People -- except maybe anything with a local celebrity on the cover. Depending on the success of the Malibu stand this year, Al expects to make close to $2 million in sales.

“It’s absolutely not true that people in this town don’t read,” the native Angeleno says. “There are some voracious and serious readers.”

Al and his young, outgoing staff would know. They see it all--Madonna buying Vanity Fair, business icons written up in Forbes, Warren Beatty picking up U.S. News and World Report. Al likes being at the heart of that street life. “I always wanted to be a policeman,” he explains. “But now I don’t think there’s anything I’d rather do than have a chain of newsstands.”