ISSUES, the Oakland print emporium and newsstand, returned to Piedmont Avenue in June after one year in the shipping-container complex MacArthur Annex. Now, though, its short-lived shipping-container location is reopening as Hubris + Sons, a used bookshop and publisher run by ISSUES co-owner Joe Colley, with live music on Saturday, Aug. 3.
ISSUES proprietors Colley and Noelle Teele, who opened the exhaustively stocked shop off Piedmont Avenue in 2007, found the MacArthur Annex location too small for customers to comfortably browse thousands of titles. Hubris + Sons, by contrast, will stock a specialized selection of used books on subjects including art, philosophy, occult and counterculture history, Colley explained.
The shop will also publish facsimile reproductions of lost countercultural texts, he said. Tabling for ISSUES at the San Francisco Art Book Fair this past weekend, Colley quietly debuted the first two titles, both from the 1970s: The Natural Childbirth of Tara, a couple’s journal of their earthy approach to pregnancy (with vivid photography), and The Book of the Mother, a California commune’s spiritual manifesto (with psychedelic parenting advice).
They’re rare titles that Colley believes should be available to researchers. “They happen to deal with children only by coincidence,” he said, adding that maybe “‘hubris’ applies to me for even trying to start this venture. And no, I have no children or sons.”
The grand opening party for Hubris + Sons: Shop for Creative Research, co-presented by neighboring Contact Records, occurs Saturday, Aug. 3 in the MacArthur Annex courtyard with a performance by Oakland synth-pop duo VVD WNDWS.—Sam Lefebvre
