There are people who like bookshops. Then there is Andrew Sivak, who once used a bookshop — Santa Cruz’s now-shuttered Logos Books & Records — to run an underground and only one-year college he claims had a 100 percent success rate in placing people into graduate schools.
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Yeah, Sivak is kind of into the whole “knowledge” thing. And as co-owner of Santa Cruz’s Bad Animal, along with business partner Jess LoPrete, he has the opportunity to spread that illumination via the roughly 15,000 used books Bad Animal has for sale, including 3,000 rare editions worth up to $40,000.
Bad Animal’s name is an oblique reference to “The Bacchae” by Euripides. The swollen collection veers toward wild, radical, design-minded and avant-garde books, with a heavy emphasis on poetry, art, Californiana, continental philosophy, the occult and the classics. Pair these with the bar’s excellent “raw wines” — natural, low-intervention wines — and Thai food, and you’ve got everything you need (in the owners’ words) to “travel the Dionysian path.”
A selection of wines is on display at Bad Animal in Santa Cruz, Calif., on May 17, 2024. (Thien-An Truong for Bay Area News Group)
One more bit of exciting news: This year, Bad Animal plans to expand into the space next door to sell art and vintage material, with a focus on print history and art such as broadsides, photographs and posters.
INTRODUCTION: Bad Animal opened in 2019 as a natural outgrowth of Sivak and LoPrete’s interests. She had cheffed in San Francisco and had expertise in wine. He had a Ph.D from UC Santa Cruz in the history of consciousness and worked as a rare-book scout.
When Logos Books shut down, they grabbed up its massive collection and started winnowing it down in a process they took “way too seriously.” “For every one book we put on the shelf,” Sivak says, “we’ve probably said no to a thousand.”
A selection of books, new and old, at Bad Animal in Santa Cruz, Calif., on May 17, 2024. (Thien-An Truong for Bay Area News Group)
Their website’s FAQ clarifies how devoted they are to books. Question: “Why should I read a book?” Answer: “Anyone who doesn’t read books is doomed.” Question: “Is it okay to sleep with someone who doesn’t read books?” Answer: “No.”
Despite the serious mission, Bad Animal is a fun place – instead of a self-help section, for instance, it has a disco ball.
“If you were to go to the great used bookshops in the middle of the century, they were very stuffy places where you were going to be feeling at least a little uncomfortable to handle the rare volumes on the shelf,” says Sivak. “They were sort of suffocating environments to be in, as beautiful as they were.”
Bad Animal is going for the opposite kind of atmosphere, one pleasantly lubricated with good conversations and intoxicating wine.
“We’re trying to operate in the same way that these antiquarian shops did in the middle of the 20th century, but in a radically different environment,” he says. “We want to encourage people to see books not just as a form of self-improvement or intellectual bodybuilding, but as actual pleasure experiences. It is pleasurable to walk around a used bookshop with a glass of wine in your hand, in the same way it is pleasurable to read a novel and enjoy a bottle of wine.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS: Unlike the special tomes that age well in Bad Animal’s rare-book room – a signed copy of Camus’ “The Stranger,” a beautiful spread of lithographs by painter June Wayne – the raw wine is generally not aged and is meant to drink soon after bottling.
The lovingly curated wine selection hails heavily from California and Europe and on any given day, might include an orange Wavy Wines “Sunshine” Skin Contact from Sonoma, a sparkling Rodica “Col Fondo Malvasia” from Slovenia or a Farm Cottage Pinot Noir from right here in the Santa Cruz mountains.
The beer and cider list has both tap and bottle options and leans toward interesting local suds like a Pelayo apple cider from Watsonville or a “Socks and Sandals” from Humble Sea Brewing. Zero-proof options might include apple-cucumber kombucha, phony Negronis and Coke and Fanta from Mexico.
After the pandemic, Bad Animal’s kitchen shifted to a residency program for up-and-coming restaurants. Right now it’s Hanloh, which cooks Thai cuisine inspired by the seasons and California’s local abundance. Recent appetizers have included Tomales Bay Hatsu oysters with bird’s-eye chili and lime and mieng kham (wrapped-leaf snacks) with apples, shallots, toasted coconut and tamarind-caramel dressing, served over nasturtium leaves. On the heartier side: white-coconut curry with shrimp and oyster mushrooms and chili jam, and charcoal-grilled Boxing Chicken with Crying Tiger Sauce and cucumbers.
EPILOGUE: Sivak just finished Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy and found “Blood Meridian” to be, you know, kind of bloody. “I don’t know how much of this is mythmaking, but (Yale literary critic) Harold Bloom famously said that he tried to read it and stopped two times, like he couldn’t get past page 80,” Sivak says. ”But then he considered it if not the great American novel, certainly in the top three and a definitive part of the Western canon, and you’d be hard-pressed to argue against him.”
DETAILS: The bookshop is open from noon to 9 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday; the bar and kitchen are open from 5 to 9 p.m. at 1011 Cedar St., Santa Cruz; badanimalbooks.com.
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