Shops in Los Angeles

The Hollywood store moved two blocks east to a purpose-built space on Argyle in 2021 and brought the used bins and the listening stations with it. Staff still price used stock by hand and write the shelf talkers. Free in-store sets happen on a small stage near the front.

Monday to Thursday 11am to 8pm, Friday to Sunday 11am to 9pm

A used vinyl shop on the Magnolia antique stretch in Burbank, buying and selling records, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays. The stock leans to classic jazz, sixties rock, punk and new wave, soul, blues, exotica and soundtracks, which is a narrower and more useful set of bins than a general shop. Open eleven to five, Tuesday through Sunday.

Tue to Sun, 11am to 5pm. Closed Mon

A family-owned Italian grocery on Lincoln since 1925, with a deli counter at the back and shelves of imported tinned fish, pasta and oil at the front. The Godmother sandwich is the reason most people are in line. You can order it on the deli's own site and skip the counter entirely.

Wednesday to Sunday 9am to 6pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Online ordering closes at 5:30pm

A Thai dessert shop and mini-mart in the same strip mall as Ruen Pair, making kanom krok and mango sticky rice on the spot and stocking packaged Thai sweets that are hard to find anywhere else in the city. You can also just buy snacks for the drive home.

Daily, 10am to 10pm

A record shop on Railroad Ave started in May 2018 by Ingrid, Steve and Anthony, two of whom had spent over twenty years selling at record shows and online before they took a storefront. Soul, jazz, rock, punk, new wave, prog and oldies, with clothing and jewelry along one wall. It is small and it is browsable in fifteen minutes or an hour depending on how much you dig.

Mon to Wed, 10am to 6pm. Thu to Sat, 10am to 8pm. Sun, 10am to 6pm

Glenn Goldman opened this on the Strip in 1975 and it holds around 60,000 titles, weighted toward art, film and photography. The aisles are narrow and the stock is stacked on the floor where it has run out of shelf. Author events run most weeks and are usually free.

Monday to Saturday 9am to 10pm, Sunday 9am to 7pm

Suye and Tokio Ueyama opened this shop on First Street in 1946, straight out of the incarceration camps, at the address where the first Japanese business in Los Angeles had stood. Irene Tsukada Simonian is the third generation to run it. The stock runs from ceramics and incense to calligraphy brushes.

Mon to Thu 10am to 6pm. Fri to Sun 11am to 7pm

A family-run shop open on Colorado Boulevard since 1956, still carrying CDs and 45s alongside the vinyl and still stocking classical and jazz in depth rather than as a gesture. The back wall runs to DVDs and Blu-rays. The hours are short and the shop closes at five most days, which is the one thing to know before walking over.

Mon to Thu, 11am to 5pm. Fri and Sat, 10:30am to 7:30pm. Sun, 11am to 5pm

A two-level used bookshop on Franklin with a record store downstairs and a rare book area at the back. Stock is dense enough that nothing is alphabetised as neatly as you would like. It has been on this block since the 1970s.

Daily, noon to 8pm

Long Beach's independent record store, five thousand square feet of new and used vinyl, CDs, cassettes and a wall of 8-tracks nobody is pretending to need. It moved up to Bixby Knolls on Atlantic Avenue and kept the in-store performances, so there is a decent chance a band is playing on the floor for free when you walk in. Staff will talk to you for as long as you want about the record in your hand.

Sun to Wed, 11am to 7pm. Thu to Sat, 11am to 9pm

A family confectionery on First Street since 1903, now in its fourth generation. The cases hold manju and mochi made that morning and sold by the piece. The shop closed during the wartime incarceration and reopened in the same block afterward.

Daily, 8am to 6pm

A family grocery that started downtown in 1897 and moved to York Boulevard in 1955, which John Nese turned over to bottled soda in the 1990s. Several hundred flavors fill every aisle, most of them small-batch or regional, and there is a sandwich counter at the back.

Mon to Sat 9am to 6pm. Sun 9am to 4pm

An all-vinyl shop on Figueroa carrying new and used stock across rock, jazz, soul, hip hop, country, Latin, blues and punk. Small enough to work through in half an hour.

Mon to Sat noon to 7pm. Sun noon to 6pm

A vintage and costume shop on the Topanga Canyon roadside, painted up like a stage set, with racks running from Victorian to the 1980s. Darrell Hazen started selling clothes in the canyon in the 1970s and opened this building in the late 1980s. Browsing costs nothing and the staff leave you alone.

Monday 11am to 6pm. Tuesday to Thursday 11:30am to 5:30pm. Friday 11am to 6pm. Saturday and Sunday 10:30am to 6:30pm

A record shop on Sixth Street, four doors from the Grand Annex and across from the Warner Grand. JDC started in 1977 as a label putting out disco and italo. Freestyle and hi-energy twelve-inches followed, and the shop still leans that way, though the bins run through every genre on vinyl, CD and cassette. This is the third storefront, after an earlier one on Pacific Avenue and a long run on Pacific Coast Highway in Hermosa Beach. The counter will talk to you about what you are holding if you want that, and leave you alone if you do not.

Tue to Sun, noon to 5pm. Closed Mon

A film bookshop that opened in 1938 and has been at this address on the Boulevard since 1955, holding more than 20,000 books and around 6,000 original posters. There are half a million stills in the drawers behind the counter. It is the last bookstore left on a street that once had a row of them.

Monday to Saturday 11am to 6pm, Sunday noon to 6pm

The site started around 1919 as the Bungalow Lodge, burned in 1929, and was rebuilt the next year in brick and stone taken from the old riverbed. That rebuilt building is the store. It sells groceries, sandwiches and coffee to a canyon with nowhere else to buy them.

Reported Monday to Friday 7am to 10pm, not confirmed by the operator

A storefront lending library across from Mariachi Plaza, started by David Kipen in 2010, where membership is a few dollars and you can also just buy the book. The shelves lean heavily on Los Angeles writing and on Spanish-language fiction. After the city cut branch hours, this place extended its own, which is the kind of detail that tells you what it is for.

Tue to Sun, noon to 6pm. Closed Mon

Every Sunday the Fairfax High School parking lot fills with around 250 vendors selling vintage clothing, records, furniture and whatever else turned up that week. Admission is three dollars and the money funds arts programs at the school and productions at the Greenway Court Theatre next door. It takes an hour to walk properly and you can leave with nothing.

Sundays only, 10am to 5pm

The shop that made Retro Row, open on 4th Street since 1986 and still run by the same people. Stock runs from the 1920s to about 2000, a lot of it dead stock that was never worn, and costume departments raid it when they need a period fit. Racks are dense and organized by decade. Looking costs nothing and nobody follows you around.

Mon to Fri, noon to 6:30pm. Sat, 11am to 6:30pm. Sun, noon to 6pm

Founded in 1938 by Fung Chow Chan and Wai Hing Chan, the year new Chinatown was built after the old one was cleared for Union Station. The strawberry whipped cream cake was created after the war by the founder's younger brother and is still the reason most people come in. Almond cookies are sold by the bag at the counter.

Mon to Thu 10am to 4pm. Fri 10am to 5pm. Sat and Sun 10am to 6pm

Billy Shire's family opened Soap Plant in 1971 selling handmade soap and their own ceramics, and it has grown into 6,500 square feet of books, toys and things nobody else stocks. La Luz de Jesus, the gallery upstairs, opened in 1986 and is where the lowbrow art movement got its footing. Openings are the first Friday of the month.

Daily. Check the shop's own page for current opening and closing times

An independent bookstore that opened on Sunset in November 2008, with new and used stock and a cafe at the back that pours coffee, beer and wine. The 9pm close is unusual for a bookshop and makes it usable on the way to a show.

Daily, 9am to 9pm

A secondhand and antiquarian bookstore four doors up from the theater, trading on Citrus Avenue since 1981 and now run by Brad and Jen Johnson under the Johnson Rare Books & Archives name. Roughly thirty thousand titles are shelved here, running from ordinary used paperbacks to genuinely rare material. It keeps short hours and is open only Thursday through Saturday, so the visit has to be planned around the shop rather than the show.

Thu and Fri, 11am to 6pm. Sat, 11am to 5pm. Closed Sunday to Wednesday

One of the largest and oldest used bookstores in Southern California, on the Cahuenga and Chandler corner, with more than 150,000 books and a leaning toward literature and the arts. Everything is secondhand. There is free parking, air conditioning that matters in August, and two cats who will sit on whatever you are reading. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Tue to Sat, 11am to 7pm. Closed Sun and Mon

Two floors of new and used books inside a former bank on Spring Street, with the old vault still in place upstairs. It opened downtown in 2005 and moved into this building in 2011. The 11pm close on most nights is unusual for a bookshop anywhere.

Mon and Tue 11am to 8pm. Wed to Sun 10am to 11pm

Adam Clark Vroman opened this in 1894 and it has been on Colorado Boulevard ever since, now across two floors with a newsstand, a stationery counter and a café upstairs. Author events run most weeks and they are free to walk into. It is five minutes from the Pasadena Playhouse stage door, which makes it the default place to kill forty minutes in the Playhouse District.

Mon to Sat, 10am to 9pm. Sun, 10am to 7pm