$30,000 for a Book? At Mystery Pier, Celebrities Can’t Get Enough

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Tucked down a narrow alleyway off the Sunset Strip lies one of Hollywood’s most enchanting shops. Founded by father and son Harvey and Louis Jason in 1998, Mystery Pier Books is a bookstore specializing in rare first editions, many of them signed.

Recognized by the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers as one of the world’s best, Mystery Pier shares the block with another local literary landmark, Book Soup, which sells only new books. But Mystery Pier offers so much more than just another holiday browsing experience.

Step inside and visitors are whisked into a portal to another dimension. It’s a museum of literary history where you can touch and — if you can afford it — even own the treasures lining its walls.

The inventory can move rapidly, however. On the day I visited, there were several plays by William Shakespeare, the first to have been bound and printed individually ($4,500 to $12,000); an English version of The Communist Manifesto signed by Joseph Stalin and priced at $35,000; and a 1947 first edition of The Diary of Anne Frank in the original Dutch, one of only 3,000 in existence.

The kindly Harvey, 85, is a sprightly London-born actor who first came to L.A. to play Julie Andrews’ assistant in the 1968 movie musical Star! He worked steadily until his final screen role, in 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, in which he played Ajay Sidhu, a hunter of Indian descent. (His wife, Pamela Franklin, is also an accomplished actress who starred alongside Maggie Smith in 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.) Son Louis, 49, proudly shows me his father’s Jurassic Park action figure, still in the box.

“When we wrapped The Lost World, I was driving in Steven Spielberg’s car around the Universal lot,” Harvey says as he strokes Booksy, the store’s shop cat. “I said to Steven, ‘I’m quitting acting and starting a book business with my son.’ He said, ‘Harvey, you’re an actor. A book shop? I don’t believe you.’ I said, ‘We’ll see.’ A year later, we opened this shop. And I’ve never been happier.”

And while Spielberg has never stepped into the spot, countless other celebrities have. Their photos line the walls. Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers wandered in just days after the store first opened and has been a fixture ever since. Diane Keaton was a Mystery Pier maven up until her death in October. (Her signed shooting script of Annie Hall sells for $8,500, the priciest screenplay in the store.) Johnny Depp, who played a rare bookseller in The Ninth Gate, is practically a brand ambassador, ordering their T-shirts — which along with the tote bags have become trendy fashion statements — by the box-load up to his nearby mansion on Sweetzer Avenue.

Angelina Jolie? “Lovely.” Jack Black? “Wonderful.” Only a handful of stars left a sour aftertaste. “Roseanne Barr once wandered in and kept saying, ‘You only sell old books here?!’ ” Louis recalls. “Then she asked if we have any ‘Louie Laymore.’ I think she meant Louis L’Amour,” Harvey adds with a laugh.

Mystery Pier specializes in Charles Dickens and first editions of Great Expectations, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist are for sale. They are not books, per se, but breathtaking boxed assemblages of the original, illustrated monthly installments. “They were the soap operas of the time,” Harvey explains.

Because Depp was recently announced as starring as Ebenezer Scrooge in a remake of A Christmas Carol, the Jasons have begun sourcing a first edition of the holiday classic. “This time of year, the studios call us up and say, ‘So and so is starring a film. It’s about X, Y and Z. What do you think would be a good match?’ So we find the perfect gift.”

This story appeared in the Dec. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.