The Disabled Entrepreneur Who Built LA’s ‘Last Bookstore’


The Last Bookstore

Additional reporting by Allen Rucker

In March, as COVID-19 began to wend its way across the United States, the Los Angeles Times solicited stories of beloved local shops, restaurants and hang-outs already closing their doors, permanently.

The list of casualties rapidly mounted: an open-play childcare center in Highland Park; an independent, LGBTQ-owned coffee shop in East Hollywood; a Middle Eastern eatery near Anaheim.

Even Souplantation, a California mainstay restaurant franchise for over 40 years, proved no match for COVID-19.

And yet, for now, The Last Bookstore, a gorgeous and expansive haven for bibliophiles in downtown Los Angeles, continues to hold its ground. Like its founder, Josh Spencer, who was paralyzed in a traffic accident at age 21, the business has a knack for persevering through unexpected setbacks.

“I’ve trained my brain, over the years, in how to deal with my disability,” says Spencer.  “Learning to deal with challenges in business is the same thing. With every little frustration, I’ve tried to figure out a positive way to spin it into something interesting or fun. Even now.”

A Comfortable Life

Before he became a wheelchair user, a business owner and a devoted father, Spencer was a teenager with a singular passion: books.

“I was a total geek until I hit about 10th grade, or so,” says Spencer. “I was very into fantasy and science fiction and then even writing and drawing out maps of these things. I was basically a Dungeons & Dragons type of guy.”

When he wasn’t ensconced in these escapist fantasy worlds, Spencer enjoyed what he describes as “an idyllic, middle-class existence” that bounced between Hawaii and North Carolina. His childhood was enriched by two sisters and two loving parents and an active life in the nondenominational church his father pastored. He hiked, surfed and enjoyed other outdoor sports.

“Once I started developing physically and getting tall and exercising, I began to move away from the books,” Spencer says. “So, for three or four years, I was much more about athletics and physicality, because that would get me more attention from girls.”

Even as he was awash with typical teenage hormones, Spencer always found joy and solace in nature and physical activity. He still recalls the sensation of warm beach sand during many spirited games of volleyball.

“Everything for me was about my feet having contact with the earth,” Spencer said in a 2019 interview with the Surviving to Thriving podcast. “Ever since I was a little kid, I would refuse to wear shoes. Being barefoot was my favorite thing in the world.”

That love of the outdoors was sustained during Spencer’s years at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he studied religion and communications and maintained an active social life. Though he immersed himself in the college experience, his post-college plans remained hazy — maybe go to Japan, teach English and surf.

In these early years, Spencer — handsome, confident and a gregarious student — retained an enduring sense that everything would work out OK.

“I was also very religious at the time,” Spencer says. “As a young, religious person, you’re very sure of yourself, and you think you have all the answers, because you haven’t lived long enough. I was very free with telling others what life was all about.”

But in 1996, during his junior year of college, Spencer’s faith and future were dramatically tested. While out riding mopeds with a friend, Spencer failed to halt for a stop sign and was hit by a speeding car.

The driver was a nurse who was running late for work. Her 10-year-old son was a passenger beside her. They stopped, terrified, in the wake of the accident.

But even as he lay in the street with a collapsed lung, broken pelvis and two exploded vertebrae, Spencer looked up at what he describes as “a perfect sky” and felt an unusual sense of internal calm.

“A Bible verse from the book of Job started cycling through my brain, almost like a reel,” says Spencer. “‘Shall I accept good from the Lord, but not trouble?’ I felt, then, that what was happening to me was fine — and maybe was even supposed to happen. It was what my lot was, coming to me from God.”

Time for a Change

Following his injury, Spencer took a year off from college and found himself not only in physical recuperation but also becoming what he describes as “emotionally flat.”

Whatever abstract ambitions he may have had pre-injury were now even further sidelined. For the moment, he was satisfied to simply play cards on the beach with friends and, gradually, to return to some versions of the extracurriculars he once enjoyed.

“I was really just going through the motions,” Spencer said. “Before [the accident], I was athletic, so this was a pretty big shock to the system to go from being extremely physical to not being able to do those things to the same degree.”

For several years, Spencer lulled himself into a comfortable, if unchallenging, routine. Beach time. Weightlifting. Video games with friends. A few hours a week spent flipping items on eBay just to pay some bills.

Josh Spencer shares his love of reading with his children.
Josh Spencer shares his love of reading with his children.

Today he admits that, if not for the support of his family, he might have ended up homeless. “My grandmother got me a little apartment, so at least I had a place to stay,” Spencer says. “But then, after a while, I started to feel a little bit like a loser. I just wasn’t going anywhere with my life. I wasn’t contributing anything.”

This shift in perspective was catalyzed, in part, by the end of a relationship with Jenna Hipp, a young woman with whom Spencer had begun to fall in love. When Jenna left Oahu to start a new life, Spencer found himself re-evaluating the trajectory of his own.

“I think people had begun to realize, ‘Oh, Josh has no ambition. He has nothing,’” Spencer says. “And a switch flipped in my head. I immediately set out to work, like, 90 hours a week. I went from being a beach bum to a workaholic in basically a week.”

But even with his mind set firmly towards productivity, Spencer still had difficulties breaking into traditional workspaces and overcoming feelings about his own limitations.

“I felt awkward in my own skin,” Spencer says. “I didn’t get any jobs. I started doing my own thing because I had to, because no one would hire me.”

On his long road to recovery, Spencer sought out treatment for depression and eventually made his way back to his first love: the written word. But when one of his early ventures, an online music magazine, collapsed and his parents divorced, Spencer decided he needed a change of scenery to get his creative and entrepreneurial juices flowing again.

“It had been a series of losses over a year or so,” he says. “It was time for a change, and I had never lived on the West Coast or in a city, so I thought I’d give Los Angeles a shot.”

People Downtown Need a Bookstore

Plenty of people arrive in California with an eye towards self-invention, but few go about it in quite the way Spencer did. There were no parties or internships or rehab or networking events. Instead, Spencer just dug in, kept his head down, and flexed his eBay muscles once again — this time by selling books out of his apartment.

He began by scouting out literature at thrift stores, garage sales, yard sales, and libraries — a relentlessly physical process that was not always well-suited for even the most skilled wheelchair user.

The Last Bookstore

“At some of these book sales,” Spencer says, “the moment they open the doors, everybody runs in and starts grabbing books. Sometimes I couldn’t even move anywhere. So I would find ‘back doors’ where I didn’t have to compete with people physically but could use my relationships to gain an advantage. What if I volunteer at this library sale? Will they let me buy books when nobody is around?”

Though he had no formal training in business, Spencer’s nascent book-buying enterprise benefited from his deep love of reading and from his natural, easy-going way with people. His disability, whatever its challenges, became an added benefit, too — something that primed others to remember and help him.

As Spencer’s book business steadily grew, so did his self-confidence and his professional network.

“I was always cognizant of being friendly. I always wanted to build people up,” he says. “My parents were good communicators, and I was raised to be kind toward others. People want to be around other people who make them feel good and who add something to their life.”

Gradually, Spencer’s homegrown book business, cheekily called “The Last Bookstore” as a nod to the rise of digital books, became too unwieldy for the confines of his loft apartment. In 2009, tempted by the allure of an affordable short-term lease, he snagged a 1,000 square-foot storefront on downtown Los Angeles’s Main Street at a key moment in the neighborhood’s evolution.

“I don’t think I ever would have pursued it until this community advocate, Brady Westwater, who lives downtown, found me,” Spencer says. | “He was like, ‘I heard you sell books online. People downtown really need a youth bookstore, and I want you to open one.’”

Expansion and Innovation

Though Westwater made no financial investment of his own, and expected no money from Spencer in return, he had a strong reputation for helping Los Angeles entrepreneurs track down, and take root in, affordable downtown locations during what was proving to be a renaissance period for the area.

“Brady never once mentioned my disability or anything about it,” says Spencer. “He just helped me look at every space downtown and found both of the locations The Last Bookstore ultimately ended up being in — the smaller one first, and then the larger one.”

“The larger one” is The Last Bookstore’s current, eye-popping location: a 22,000-square-foot bank building that hails from the early 20th century. Although today its epic “book tunnels” and hand-drawn wall art have lit up many an Instagram feed, the location was first a blank slate on which Spencer could let his imagination run wild.

“I just sat in there, in this huge and empty space, and I let it speak to me,” he says. “I tried to really hear and see what the space felt like. And the vibe I got was Indiana Jones — an early ’20s-’30s university kind of thing. And maybe a Hellboy steampunk feel, too. Stylish and fantastical.”

With the help of his father, Alan, an experienced contractor, Josh set about turning his singular vision into an inviting reality:

A purchase desk that is, itself, seemingly made of books. A labyrinth of literature that visitors could walk through and take selfies from within. Special hide-away spaces for antique books and artwork.

How, exactly, would such a unique and expansive space come to be? At first, Spencer wasn’t sure. But just as he had done since the beginning of his ventures into business, he relied on the strength of community relationships.

“Without my dad’s help, this would all have been cost-prohibitive,” Spencer said. “And, as far as artistic elements, we lucked out there, too.  There were a lot of artists with studios in that building. … A lot of people who were just excited about improving downtown LA. The Last Bookstore was something that was really up-and-coming. A group thing. A big art project.”

Spencer transformed an empty bank building with whimsical arches of books and other features that have come to define The Last Bookstore.
Spencer transformed an empty bank building with whimsical arches of books and other features that have come to define The Last Bookstore.

A Storybook Ending

In the nine years that have followed its opening at Fifth and Spring in downtown Los Angeles, that big, group art project has been recognized by Conde Nast Traveler as California’s largest new-and-used bookstore, has been featured in an award-winning documentary called Welcome to The Last Bookstore, has grown to occupy two separate warehouses, and has even housed a $2,300 first-edition Jack Kerouac novel.

It’s drawn a visitor from Kenya, eagerly looking for (and finding!) a childhood story he’d been tracking for decades. It’s attracted YouTubing backpackers hoping to snag some video of the store’s famous book tunnel.

And for Spencer, The Last Bookstore has helped supply direction and purpose to a life that once felt sun-dappled but directionless.

“I really love this work,” Spencer says. “It’s an ideal environment for me, to just be constantly gaining more and more information — to soak in all of this. Every day I’m going through boxes, finding new books I’ve never seen before.”

Today, although the Last Bookstore has just as much warmth and character as it did when Spencer dreamed it up all those years ago, there’s not as much foot traffic through its aisles. The ongoing threat of COVID-19 has reduced the store’s sales by 80%, but staff are recouping some of this loss by hosting socially distant weddings and other special events, and by allowing a limited number of visitors to sit and read while wearing masks.

And yet, perhaps because he’s no stranger to unwanted surprises, Spencer is outwardly unbothered by the impact the global pandemic may yet have on the future of his business.

“I would say COVID has turned [running The Last Bookstore] into a more manageable stress,” he said, no doubt tapping into the same resilience that buoyed him after that life-changing car accident 24 years ago. “Everything was feeling a little off the rails before COVID, and now we can shrink down but still have just as many, if not more, books.”

One of The Last Bookstore’s most imaginative weapons against COVID-19 customer loss is its new “book bundle” offering, which invites readers to send employees a list of their personal literary tastes and then to receive a curated batch of surprise books in the mail.

“The whole thing was just built around a surprise,” says Spencer. “You don’t know what books you’re going to get. At first I thought, ‘Who wants to buy a stack of books without knowing what it is?’ But it just took off like a rocket, and people really loved the idea. It was really hot.”

Though his imagination has powered so much of The Last Bookstore’s survival in the past, Spencer is the first to admit he can’t take credit for that book bundle idea — it came from someone he married in December.

Her name is Jenna Hipp Spencer, the woman he’d fallen for more than 20 years ago. Today, they work side by side at The Last Bookstore and raise four children.

You might call theirs a storybook ending — but given the resilience of Josh Spencer and The Last Bookstore, there will likely be countless more stories to tell. You may visit them online anytime you like at shopthelastbookstore.com.


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