Cody's

Walking back home from the SPUR luncheon yesterday, we stopped off at the new Cody's Books at 2 Stockton Street, near Market and bought some books.

Support your local independent bookseller.

His nibs picked up a mappish book of Venice for when we'll be there next spring. I picked up a signed copy of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking because I'd read John Leonard's review in The New York Review of Books and good things at Chekhov's Mistress.

These were books we didn't truly need, but according to The Chron, Andrew Ross is taking a huge gamble, opening this 22K sq ft, two-level bookstore near Union Square (estimated cost over $3.5 million) when his two Berkeley Cody's haven't shown a profit for the past two years.

Hunker down? Or go for broke and put a bookstore where Planet Hollywood fizzled out? Ross decided to go for broke, and we hope that others will flock to his gamble and keep him in business.

We're glad to see Cody's in San Francisco.

Support your local independent bookseller.

Update: Yow. Am I au courant or what?

Article in this week's Time Magazine on Cody's on Stockton -- said magazine pushed through the slot with the rest of today's mail.