Written on the Dock of the Bay: Saying farewell to bookstores and book lovers

Bay Area Book World Breaking News! Here’s a beautiful tribute to a San Francisco bookstore lover, Steve Brandwein. Brandwein loved to play chess in the Mechanic’s Institute Chess Room by morning, and hang out in Adobe Books by night. He loved Pepsi and canned beef stew. He did not like how Richard Nixon handled the Vietnam War. He was the kind of person you might read about in a book. To celebrate his life, there’s a memorial planned for him at the Mechanics’ Institute on January 24th, plus there’s now a memorial with pictures, candles, and a chessboard at Adobe Books. January’s been a pretty good month for comic book writers and readers. Actually, it’s been a pretty decent decade. The comic book industry is booming , and some say, growing more diverse. According to a Berkeleyside interview with comic book writer Ayize Jama-Everett, “It’s a great time to be a person of color in comics.” In case you haven’t heard, Berkeley is set to lose another indie bookstore . This time, it’s Black