Clio's Books

Oakland, California

Clio's Books is a bookstore and bar on Grand Avenue in Oakland working under the motto real books, real people, real drinks. A collection of more than ten thousand new and used volumes is shelved chronologically rather than by subject, so Sappho lands in the seventh century BCE, Rumi sits beside Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, and James Baldwin fills the 1960s, turning the shop into a continuous timeline of human thought. Self help, the owners note, is found in bottles behind the bar. Screens are not used in the room. A membership program supports the project, and a near nightly calendar of talks and readings runs until close.