As a long-time cinephile, I enjoy watching old movies and TV shows, and as a bibliophile, I love books, libraries, and bookstores.
Occasionally those two loves combine—as when a character in a film or TV show I'm watching enters a library or bookshop. This happened the other day during an episode of the 1970s cop drama, The Streets of San Francisco.
In The Bullet, an episode from 16 December 1972, police inspector Steve Keller (Michael Douglas) pops into a local bookstore to purchase a volume of verse by poet Ezra Pound as a gift for his partner Lt. Mike Stone (Karl Malden).
During this sequence, viewers get only a brief peek at the store's interior, but that was enough—along with the shop's name: Minerva's Owl—to intrigue me.
Aside from my love of bookstores, this also interested me because my Young Adult fantasy e-book series, The Samantha Stanton Adventures, features a luxurious Victorian mansion with an extensive private library—a library with a painted mural of Athena and her owl on its high ceiling. In Greek mythology, Athena was known as goddess of wisdom, but the Romans knew her as Minerva.
For this reason, Minerva's Owl struck me as a most appropriate name for a bookstore, and one I might perhaps visit someday. During my research, I managed to learn its address: 2181 Union Street in San Francisco's Cow Hollow neighborhood, but I also discovered—much to my dismay—that Minerva's Owl is no longer in business.
It wasn't all for naught, however, as I did learn some facts about the shop's history and its co-owner, Carol Field, a woman with a most interesting life. As I ended my search knowing a bit more than when I started, I like to think that Minerva, goddess of wisdom, would have been pleased.
There's more to come in the next dispatch.
©2024 SummitCityScribe