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My Undying Love for Green Apple Books

On celebrating the great San Francisco bookstore we’ve all come to adore

Steve Kettmann
The Bold Italic
5 min readSep 21, 2021

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Photo: Courtesy of Flickr via Lynn Friedman

Like any aspiring writer in San Francisco, I used to limit my pilgrimages to Green Apple Books on Clement Street.

It wasn’t just that, like many aspiring writers, I was often totally broke, living on top ramen and peanut butter and the occasional slice of pizza, and any time I let myself walk the aisles at Green Apple Books, I couldn’t help blowing food money on, say, a lesser William Burroughs title that had previously escaped me, or maybe a novel by Didion or Vonnegut.

Even if I didn’t buy a book at Green Apple Books, a visit still had a way of both inspiring and exhausting me — the seriousness and book love emanating from the place, embodied in everyone who worked there, gave a kind of high seriousness to my daily journeys through the horror of confronting the white space of unwritten pages. It felt like I needed to have a book authored by me on the shelves at Green Apple Books if I was ever going to feel like anything short of a failure.

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Written by Steve Kettmann

I write on politics now and then, starting with belief that 2024 could be the end of U.S. democracy, and that California leadership matters.

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