John Martin

Which of these three terms best describes your relationship to Los Angeles: point of origin, detour, or destination?

It was a destination.

What year does your relationship with Los Angeles begin?

I was born in 1930, raised in San Francisco, and then for family reasons, my mother moved us to Los Angeles in 1942.

As a youth, how did you perceive the difference between San Francisco and LA?

San Francisco was, and is, a wonderful, beautiful, amazing city, but it’s buttoned down. It’s controlled by the wealth of a few, and there’s really little sense of open space for new adventures. The minute I got to Los Angeles, it seemed like an open field. I had the feeling, all of a sudden, that anything was possible. That there was no structure in place to stop me from accomplishing whatever I wanted, so long as it was legal.

I began to think about all kinds of possibilities for my life.After I was out of school and married, I started Black Sparrow Press at the most basic level, in my living room. It eventually became known worldwide and is considered by some to be one of the best literary presses of the post-World War II era. That was possible in LA.

Can you describe your first house or apartment in LA? What was the street? Who were the neighbors?

We lived in apartments and flats. By the way, do you make a distinction between LA and Beverly Hills? Beverly Hills was not always Beverly Hills. In ’42, it was really modest. I was with my mother and my twin sister and my older brother. We lived on Young Drive, which is directly across the street from Beverly Hills High School. A few years later, we moved about a block away, to Marino Drive, which was even closer to Beverly High. After that, my mother was a nomad and we moved to several flats and apartments in LA until I got married in 1959.

When the city was new to you, where did you go for fun? What were your rituals?

In the early 1940s what I liked to do was take those electric red cars all over the city. I loved the red cars. They had wonderful cane seats and they’d clatter along. Of course, with electrical power, there was no pollution. As I recall, the fare was 10 cents. I could board the red cars at a little depot at the north end of Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills and go wherever I wanted. West Hollywood with its great bookstores was a favorite destination.

At that time, I also collected jazz records, and what I mean by jazz records has nothing to do with LPs or tapes. These were the original 10-inch shellac records recorded in the 1920s and early 1930s, which are rare now. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke. You had to be in love with the music because the fidelity was poor compared to today’s recordings.

In the 1950s I’d go to Watts, where I was only white face to be seen. I’d go to used furniture stores, ask for old records, and they’d have them piled in broken-down cabinets. Nobody wanted them and they were ten cents each. I would find records by my favorite artists (mentioned above), all waiting for someone to buy and love them again. I was able to build a really fantastic collection of this jazz music. As I’m sitting here, I have a framed Louis Armstrong Okeh on the wall and a framed Paramount by Ma Rainey on the wall.

And then I became more interested in literature and books. I would take the red car to Hollywood Boulevard where the bookstores were. And there were some great bookstores at that time. The Larry Edmunds Bookstore stood out, and later there was a B. Dalton that had nothing but rare books on the third floor.

When you were first venturing into Los Angeles beyond your immediate environs, who showed you places you hadn’t seen before? What did they share with you?

There were no kids that I knew of at Beverly High who were interested in Los Angeles as Los Angeles. And I was always interested in where I lived so I explored on my own. I did have a best friend who also collected rare books and original shellac jazz records. By that time, I had a car and we would drive all over to book and antique stores, even to junk stores, where hopefully some dealer had cleaned out a house. Later, when we became more sophisticated, we patronized first edition dealers like Jake Zeitlin, Bennett and Marshall, and Max Hundley.

There was such a thriving book culture and rare book culture in L.A. What was the bookstore where you spent the most time?

Maxwell Hundley had a bookstore on “little” Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It was a wonderful small adobe building that had originally been a hunting lodge circa 1900. People living in early downtown Los Angeles would ride horseback to stay at the lodge and hunt. Max was a great bookman. We became close friends.

Was Zeitlin important to you?

Oh, Jake, of course! Jake sold me my first D.H. Lawrence manuscript. He was very kind to me. We were having a talk one afternoon just before he closed on a Saturday and I lamented I would never be able to afford a D.H. Lawrence manuscript. And he said, “Well, just wait a minute.” He came back and showed me a beautiful manuscript of a short story called “A Sick Collier.” And I said, “I can't buy that Jake.” And he said, “Pay me when you can and as you can.” My first D.H. Lawrence manuscript! I ended up building what I believe was the best private holding of Lawrence's original periodicals, first editions, manuscripts, special editions and paintings. And that’s what I sold in 1965 to finance Black Sparrow Press.

What song do you associate with the period when you were new to Los Angeles?

Of course, it was a song on an original ten inch record issued in the late 1920s. Jelly Roll Morton’s “Doctor Jazz.” "Hello central, give me Doctor Jazz…!" I could sing you the whole lyric right now, but I won’t. That’s my LA song. I wouldn’t lower myself then to listen to Glenn Miller or Woody Hernan, big band stuff. I was not into popular culture at all. For me, then, it had to be pure pre-1930 hot jazz.

Morton’s grave is in East Los Angeles.

The great man, the great man!

A lot of the early jazz originators later relocated to LA.

In the early ‘50s, I was sick for a while and my hair grew very long. I was ashamed of it (those were the days!) and I didn’t want to go to my regular barber. So I got onto National Boulevard and drove west, almost to Venice, until I saw a barber pole. I pulled over and went in and an old guy is standing there alone, a completely unremarkable person in his 70s. He started to cut my hair and we began to chat. He said something about jazz, and I said, “Oh, you like jazz?” And he said, “Well, I used to play it.” I said, “Really? Where?” And he said, “Mostly in Kansas City.” I asked his name and he said, “Brun Campbell.” He told me who he played with and about all his career. He worshipped the ragtime pioneer Scott Joplin. There was a piano in the barbershop, which was not common at all. He walked over, sat down, and ripped off ragtime like I had never heard in person.

At that time, I was helping a local promoter stage concerts with Kid Ory. I arranged for Brun Campbell to play the intermission. He became famous in LA for a moment, just before he died, in 1952. He was recorded and he had a following and he had an agent and a promoter. Best of all, he had new life! I was just so pleased I had stopped in foreign territory to get that haircut.

Can you describe your initial encounter with Charles Bukowski? How did he fit into the landscape of LA writers at the time you met him?

I was thinking of starting a publishing company without having any real idea of what was involved or even exactly what a publisher was. I decided to sell my rare book collection to University of California, Santa Barbara, and use the money to start Black Sparrow. At that time, I kept up with the flood of publications coming from small presses. Many were mimeograph periodicals, some in quantities of 50, sent to a few people on a mailing list. That’s how I was able to read all the poets and writers who hadn’t yet emerged, or would never emerge.

There was a magazine published in New Orleans called The Outsider. In 1963, I got a copy of The Outsider #3, which was the Charles Bukowski issue. I remember it was a Saturday morning, it was raining, and I sat there and read through the issue of his work. And the world changed for me. That was it. I was going to publish Charles Bukowski.

I looked him up in the phone book—he was living in East Hollywood—and went to see him. We sat down in his disheveled apartment on De Longpre Avenue. We found a clean piece of paper. I had a fountain pen, a gift which I treasured. We sat there and made a list of his monthly living expenses: rent, $35; food, $25; child support, $15; cigarettes, $11, etc. And it came to a hundred dollars. I said, “Well, I can give you that once a month if you’ll quit the post office and write for me.” And we made a deal.

We had both been sitting there side by side in front of his coffee table, which was strewn with stuff like you couldn't believe. As I got up to go, I said, “Where’s my pen?” We looked everywhere. I said, “Well, when you find it later, would you give it back?” And he said, “Of course, of course.” He never found it. And that tells you something about the disorder of Bukowski's apartment.

As a young bibliophile and literary obsessive, where did you place him when you first encountered his work? What writers did you connect to him?

I thought he was the contemporary Walt Whitman, writing right from the street. Him, his work, and the reader: nothing to break up that flow. That’s writing at its most alive. Ezra Pound said that there are three kinds of writers. There are the originators, the masters, and the imitators. Bukowski was an originator. That kind of writing, to me, is the most exciting.

Can you describe the Black Sparrow office when you started?

What office? It was in my living room on Camden Avenue, right at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard, one block east of National Boulevard. I was working at a company called Office Supplies Unlimited. I was the manager, and we sold office furniture, office supplies, and office printing. I was mostly interested in the printing and was friendly with Philip Klein, who printed the first few Black Sparrow items as a favor. I published five broadsides by Bukowski in editions of 30. Most of them went to the staff at my company! Believe it or not, they’re each worth thousands now. Klein also printed a little booklet called Two By Bukowski. So I had Bukowski in hand and I had a printer who found it interesting and fun to do these little jobs for me. It was a perfect fit.

What was your wife Barbara doing at that time?

We had a child by then and she worked as a model in department stores. The first four or five little things from Black Sparrow were designed by the several printers involved. After a year, she looked at the latest effort and said, “I can do better than that.” She stopped modeling and since then has designed every—literally, almost every—Black Sparrow title and become famous as a book designer.

I’m in awe of Barbara’s cover designs for Black Sparrow.

When I was looking for books before we were married, if I saw a New Directions book, I would buy it because I knew I would be interested. I wanted to develop that same kind of trust with readers of Black Sparrow. I hoped Barbara’s covers would draw people to take the books down off the shelf and give them a look.

It still works. When I see Black Sparrow titles at the Iliad in North Hollywood, the spines stand out even in a giant tower of books.

That’s what we were after. How lucky can you get, to marry a great book designer when you had no idea that you would ever need a book designer or that your wife would be the one?

Where did Barbara grow up?

Barbara was raised on a farm in Illinois about 25 miles outside of Chicago. And she came west with a girlfriend in about 1957, just before we met. We got married within six months of meeting. That was in 1959. She was working paste-up and design at the May Company department store in downtown LA. She was doing their advertising layouts. Enough of that stuck with her that in 1966 she was able to look at the first little items I’d published and say, “I can do better than that.”

Was the aesthetic that she developed for Black Sparrow inspired by any particular presses or designers?

It was inspired by the Russian constructivists and by Wyndham Lewis, an English Vorticist painter and writer who I admired greatly. I brought all of Lewis’ early books back into print at one point. And Barbara subscribed to lots of art periodicals. These were her influences.

Where would you spend time with Bukowski after you went into business together?

I didn't go to the track with him or anything like that, but we spent a lot of time talking about publishing. and what's next, that kind of thing. At that time, I was living on Camden Avenue, west of Westwood Village, and he was living in East Hollywood, so we spent a lot of time on the phone. Every couple of days, maybe twice a week, he would mail me whatever poems he was working on, or whatever book chapter he had finished. In 1975, I moved BSP to Santa Barbara. By that time, BSP had really grown into a real business, and I needed space and a few more employees. When I was in Santa Barbara, he visited a couple of times, but nearly all of our communication was over the phone and by mail.

During its years in LA, did Black Sparrow ever have an office or was it always operated out of your house?

I had some great friends, an older couple, who lived in Cheviot Hills on Kilrenney Avenue. There was a cottage behind their house they let me use. For my last seven years in LA, from 1968 to 1975, that was my office. It was perfect. I had room to store some stock and I was able to add a couple of employees. So I ran Black Sparrow as a regular business behind that house on Kilrenney.

When radio mattered in Los Angeles, what program, DJ, or announcer did you love?

KFWB and KKRC. Frank Bull was the public address announcer for sports events at the L.A. Coliseum and he had a radio program on KFWB called America Dances, at 7:00 p.m., where he sometimes played my kind of jazz. Then there was a host at KFRC for many years, a legend in his time, who conducted a classical music program starting at 10:00 p.m. It was also Bukowski’s favorite program to listen to while he wrote his poems at night.

Describe your first, favorite, or longest-owned car.

Well, let me tell you my least favorite longest-owned car. My brother's father-in-law had an Oldsmobile agency, and he had a European import called DKW. It was a knockoff of the Volkswagen Beetle. I endured that car for several years. Then I bought a new 1968 Ford Fairlane, and I loved that car. I had it for 20 years. My employees and I ended up using it to haul books around. It never broke down. It was wonderful.

That Fairlane was the Black Sparrow workhorse?

It was. I still had friends from my days working at Office Supplies Unlimited, and I rented space in their garages for bulk stock. Every day, one of us would drive to those garages to take cartons of books back to the office on Kilrenney to fill orders. Then my taste in cars got a little more exotic. I bought a used ’58 Jaguar in 1970 for $1500 in beautiful condition. Painted racing green. I still have pictures of it. We drove that for a number of years.

Describe the restaurant in which you spent time.

The Apple Pan on Pico Boulevard. In my youth, (late 1940s) it was opened by three guys who’d served in the Second World War. There was the one room with a circular counter and stools, no tables. All they served was hickory burgers and apple pie. The business thrived, they became prosperous and soon were living in swanky nearby Century City. They never expanded and personally continued to work the counter and kitchen. I did love those hickory burgers. Oh my God! If I ever get to LA again, and they are still there, that’ll be my first stop.

What outdoor space have you spent the most time?

There was a little park in Beverly Hills, near where I lived. Roxbury Park. As a kid, my after-school paper route cut directly through it. There was always a softball game going on. They always needed one more player. The first time I said, “I can’t, I’ve got to deliver these papers.” The second time they talked me into it. And then for a year or more, I would join those softball games.

As an adult, I was never an outdoor person. I'm someone who stays home and reads. But I used to go watch baseball. This is before the major leagues came to Los Angeles. My favorite team was the L.A. Angels, they played at Wrigley Field, which was downtown. The Hollywood Stars were nearer, at Gilmore Field. I still remember those players, some of whom went on to the major leagues. I have a baseball signed by every L.A. Angel, if I can find it.

How about boxing?

I’d go downtown to the Olympic Auditorium and watch the Thursday night fights. Hank (Bukowski) also loved the Olympic. We would meet up there. It was a raucous, rundown hole in the wall. Perfect for boxing. Jimmy Lennon Sr. was the announcer. (Jimmy Lennon Jr. is still going strong!) I think it only seated about a thousand. And it was cheap, and those Mexican fighters fought to the death.

I also watched the Saturday night fights at the Hollywood Legion. I loved those brave fighters who never had much of a career. I remember Chilling Charlie Green and Teeny Weenie Keeny Teran. He was huge! He was a bantamweight and everyone was certain he would become a world champion. Keeny was addicted to heroin, yet still managed to win several big fights.

I could come up with a dozen fighters that I really loved but my favorite was Golden Boy Art Aragon. We became friends.

How did you come face to face with Art Aragon?

I had a friend named Bob Samsel. He was the first legally blind person ever to pass the bar in California. He worked with a lot of ordinary clients in LA. Not corporations—he was dealing with guys accused of theft, murder, that kind of law practice. He knew Art Aragon, who eventually became a bail bondsman after retiring from boxing. Bob put us in touch and I invited Art and his wife to dinner. And he came! Then he invited Barbara and me to his place. He showed us his old fight films. It was wonderful. He gave me a large photo of himself signed, “To Johnny ‘The Rock’ Martin.”

Whether or not you swam, what beach or pool lingers in your memory?

I was in LA for 35 years. If I went to the beach three times, I’d be surprised. The last time I went to the beach, someone talked me into it. So we went and I was swimming and all of a sudden this enormous turd floated by. And I swam out of there and said never again.

What movie theater would you bring back from the dead?

I went often to the Warner Brothers Theater in Beverly Hills on Wilshire Blvd. And the Wiltern, on Wilshire and Western. And I went, of course, to Grauman's Chinese Theatre. I made the rounds. If I had to pick one movie house it would be The Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax. That’s where Barbara and I would go on weekends. There we watched Dali’s Surrealist “The Andalusian Dog,” where a person (I’m sure it was a corpse) had their eyelid spread apart and their eyeball slit neatly in half as part of a montage. We watched all kinds of experimental films plus Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Is that theatre still there?

What is your favorite bar or nightclub that no longer exists?

I’ve never been in a bar, a fact that stunned Bukowski. As for nightclubs, my favorite was the Beverly Cavern on Melrose Avenue. Kid Ory played there for some years. Ory was one of the few original New Orleans jazz musicians who eventually drifted west after the U.S. Army closed down the New Orleans red light district (“Storyville”) in 1918, where jazz had been born, because many soldiers were getting venereal disease. Ory ended up in LA where he worked for the post office. When New Orleans jazz became popular again in the 1940s, Ory formed a band, and ended up at the Beverly Cavern. For me, the sound of LA would not be Glenn Miller’s big band music, or even the bebop that followed. It would be Ory playing “Dippermouth Blues” or “Muskrat Ramble.”

Do you have any particular memories of interacting with Ory?

Yeah! He was very cool and he recognized me and other regulars seated in the Beverly Cavern. Between sets, he’d come over to the little tables and talk to the seated audience. Of course, I asked him for information about his musical start in New Orleans. He was a wonderful raconteur. I really enjoyed his company.

With jazz players, it can be better to see them when they’re older. You can hear the accumulation.

Ory made his first jazz music when he was in his 20s. When I saw him, he was in his 50s and 60s. Jazz musicians may not retain the youth and the breath to play for hours every night in their later years. But the spirit is always there. So instead of the unlimited bravado of early jazz, the music was more Zen.

It reminds me of how Bukowski developed as a writer from the time I first published him until he died. His work went from the wild, young, no-limits writing to very thoughtful and Zen poems.

Jazz musicians often cut even deeper later in their careers. Their first youthful wave is a wild affirmation of life and their second mature wave is a more thoughtful, sharper confirmation of life.

What was your first earthquake or your worst earthquake?

Earthquakes never bothered me. It isn’t like in the movies where you fall into a big crack and are never seen again. It just shakes things up. I was living on Camden Avenue in 1971. It was a small apartment with a fireplace in the middle of the wall in the living room. I had bookcases of all my rare books that went from the fireplace to the walls on either side and to the ceiling. When that earthquake hit early one morning, I ran in there and held the bookcases up against the wall so they wouldn’t topple forward. That’s what I cared about.

What demolition broke your heart?

The Richfield Building in downtown LA. There were heavy glass panels set high along the roofline to let in filtered light. They were made by Lalique, the famous French glass maker, with Art Deco figures and designs in each panel. I was horrified when I heard they were bringing the building down. Those panels were worth little at the time but each one was a wonderful artwork in its own right. When I saw that building being torn down, I went, and begged, and got the workers to give me one panel. The rest were scrapped.

Do you still have it?

No. Somewhere, in all my moves, it just disappeared.

If you had the power to preserve a space or building in Los Angeles, what would you protect? Not necessarily for the public good but for personal reasons.

That’s easy. It’d be my pleasure and for the public good. The Pacific Mercantile Bank Building, on Wilshire, just outside Beverly Hills. It’s the most beautifully designed building, finished in brushed concrete with swirls and long lines. When they were brushing the concrete they created wonderful designs in the concrete itself. Whenever I was going somewhere, I would go out of my way just so I could drive by and look at it.

Conversely, what’s a building or feature you would tear down? Not necessarily for the public good, but for your own personal reasons.

LA’s strange, in that there’s not a lot that doesn’t work. Bunker Hill, Downtown LA, Hollywood, the Wilshire District, Beverly Hills, Westwood Village. Santa Monica. Nothing ever stood out and made me think, “This has gotta come down.”

Besides the traffic, what’s one change you observed in Los Angeles over the period you’ve known it?

What gripes me is when some power brokers went to the city council in LA after World War Two and talked them into getting rid of the electric red cars that did not pollute. The city council replaced the red cars with smelly buses. I can’t believe that any city council would agree to such a change. There’s nothing like the rattling of a red car. It was marvelous. LA had something perfect and now it has buses.

Do you have a memory associated with the first arrival of freeways in Los Angeles?

Very vaguely. The only freeway I traveled a lot was the Pasadena Freeway. After I started Black Sparrow, I became friendly with the artist R. Crumb. I published him and he came to visit from Sacramento because I had mentioned I once collected the original jazz and blues records he loved and I knew where we could find them. He came with his wife, Aline, and I took off from work on a Saturday morning to pick him up from where he was staying.

We started out in Pasadena, where Ray Avery had moved his rare record shop. Ray pulled his best rare records out from the back room. OMG! Crumb was amazed and delighted. He bought a stack of records. We put them in the trunk of the car and we were on our way to another record source. While crossing the bridge between Pasadena and Glendale, over the Arroyo Seco freeway, a girl dashed out. I slammed on my brakes, she ran in front of us, across the road, to the high wire fence, and went over it as easily as a squirrel. I jumped out of the car, I tried to grab her foot, her shoe came off and she went over and fell hundreds of feet to the freeway below. I got back in the car, badly shaken, and Crumb said, “You didn't arrange that for me, did you?”

Crumb made me play the radio for the rest of the day as we went around visiting my old record haunts, because he wanted to hear the news report of the girl’s suicide, until we finally did, and then I could turn my radio off.

Conversely, what’s one thing that will never change—in other words, one thing in Los Angeles that is timeless? This can be as small as a doorknob or as large as the sky.

The Beverly Hills I grew up in has now largely transformed into a colony of obscene wealth. But in the 1940s, the residential area south of Wilshire, where we lived, was modest indeed. That was my bike route delivering the Citizen News. I knew every house, every apartment, every lawn, every garden, every porch and exactly where to throw each newspaper. I drove through there maybe 10 years ago with my brother. We went to some of our old places and I swear nothing changed. Nothing. May it stay the same forever.

What is a place in Los Angeles that was described to you but you never got to see for yourself? In other words, a place that lives only in your imagination?

I was aware of the Stanley Rose Bookshop on Hollywood Blvd. And I’ve had people tell me so much about it, that I’m not sure if I actually ever went there myself. There’s a Hollywood movie where one of the characters is spending time in the Stanley Rose Bookshop. And he takes down off the shelf the first edition of one of Dashiell Hammett’s most famous mystery novels, which I never could find at a price I could afford. It’s a $20,000 or $30,000 book now. And the character in the film tears it in half, for good reason, as part of the film’s plot. I can no longer watch that film.

Whose backyard would you return to if you could?

We always lived in apartments, so there were no backyards that I can think of except where my office was on Kilrenney Drive. I loved that backyard. It was established and had been in place for 30, 40 years. It was on a slope with eucalyptus trees. The dear couple who let me use the cottage there for my office, had a beautiful rose garden. (Bukowski wrote a poem about it.) There was a little fishpond in the center and gravel paths. It was quiet and I loved it. I gave an interview once when my daughter Carrie was about three, and they took a picture of me sitting at the edge of that fishpond with her. I kept the magazine for years. I don't know where it is now. I wish I had it.

Today, what is the current view out your window or a view that you see on a daily basis?

Thanks to the success of BSP, Barbara and I live in a beautiful spot up on a rise, surrounded by oak trees, looking out over our garden from the side of a hill above Santa Rosa. Where we are, you can’t plant anything the deer will eat. We had to limit ourselves to native plants that the deer would leave alone. We have beautiful oaks that are very tall. The house is engulfed in leaves in the high season. We’ve been here 38 years. Here we will remain until our final adventure unfolds.

Can you describe a personal memento of Los Angeles—a token of the city you've kept in the form of an image or an object?

Why don't you go to 10278 Kilrenney and photograph that house from the front? Behind that house is where Black Sparrow started and where it took root. It grew from that point on, but those seven years enabled it to exist beyond being a hobby.

I asked a friend of mine who lives near there to go take a picture of the house. He rode over on his bike and got his camera out and was sitting on his bike ready to take a picture. A guy ran out of the house and said, “What are you doing here?” And he tried to explain, “Black Sparrow Press started here. This is a landmark.” The owner didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. ◆