Bookstore With Family Ties to "The Business" Succeeds in Studio City

March 27, 2003

There's a charming small-town look and feel to the Tujunga Village section of Studio City, in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. The block-long commercial stretch is home to half a dozen shops and cafes, clustered invitingly close and exuding a Mediterranean air. And the patrons who frequent Tujunga Court's merchants display the sort of devoted support that small-town merchants crave and need.

"Our customers are very faithful," says Julie von Zerneck, co-owner of Portrait of a Bookstore, a Tujunga Village shop open from 9:30 in the morning until 9:00 at night, seven days a week. "Right after 9/11, we probably had our best day ever, because they all came in and said, 'We're so afraid this is going to affect your business; we don't want anything to happen to you.'

"For weeks afterward, people would come in saying, 'Okay, tell us what to buy; how much do you need from us today?' They were just amazing. And they've continued to be that way."

Portrait of a Bookstore is quaintly small. "It's tiny!" says manager Lucia Silva. "It's scarcely 10 to 12 feet across, and probably twice that long; basically, a little alleyway of a bookstore." But the shop is full of well-displayed front- and backlist titles (including current Book Sense 76 picks), and Silva thinks the selectivity necessitated by Portrait's size works to the patrons' and the stock's advantage. "You're able to browse all the books, one by one, in maybe an hour or two -- so you find things you might never find in a larger bookstore," she explained.

Given Portrait of a Bookstore's location, in the not-so-ordinary small town of Studio City (near several movie and TV studios), you also may find customers there you wouldn't see in other bookshops.

Portrait's patrons include "a lot of people from 'the industry,'" says Silva. "Writers, actors producers."

A fireplace room adjacent to Portrait's main space holds shelves displaying writing guides, reference, and mythology books. This cozy room, with eight tables, is popular with creative types, says von Zerneck: "We have people who just stay here for hours writing." The garden-patio outside, connected (as is the fireplace room) to the Aroma Coffee and Tea Co., with whom Portrait shares its space, has more tables, which are often taken by film-industry types for informal production meetings.

Portrait of a Bookstore itself, as it happens, has family ties to "the business."

"My husband makes movies-for-television," von Zerneck explains.

"One of the first groups of movies he made were called 'Portrait of a … ': Portrait of a Centerfold, Portrait of a Mistress, Portrait of a Housewife; they were very well-received. When we wanted to open a bookstore, we were trying to come up with a name. We were having dinner with my husband's former partner, and he said, 'Why don't you call it, Portrait of a Bookstore?' We laughed, and said; 'Oh, wouldn't that be horrible?'

"But then we thought -- because it's the four of us who own it; our daughter Danielle, who is an actress-producer; our son Frank, Jr., who is a writer-director; Frank, and I -- we would indeed call it Portrait of a Bookstore. And our logo would be a portrait of the four of us: [silhouette] profiles of us all, that we got at Disneyland!"

Before opening Portrait 17 years ago, von Zerneck says, she and her daughter went to Chicago to attend an ABA booksellers school: "We learned, so much! And there they kept emphasizing, 'Location! Location! Location!'"

Portrait of a Bookstore's initial location was in nearby Toluca Lake, a few blocks away from Warner Bros. Soon after Portrait's debut, a Crown store opened nearby, but Portrait outlived it. Eventually, Portrait of a Bookstore relocated to another Toluca Lake site, across the road from its first address. Then, some six years ago, when a lease expiration necessitated the Toluca Lake store's closing, the von Zernecks learned of the Tujunga Village space available from Aroma Coffee and Tea.

Portrait's books are supplemented by gift items bought at antique fairs in England (where the von Zernecks have a cottage in the Cotswolds). Julie says they tie these items to books on display: "We'll set up cookbooks with beautiful old Victorian china sets, old typewriters, writing desks, and pens with creative books. And we have a lot of customers who just love the antiquarian books we bring back. One is Delta Burke's husband, Gerald McRaney, who always says, 'Show me everything before anyone else!'"

Portrait of a Bookstore hosts frequent book signings, some of which reflect its show-business connections. "We just had a wonderful singing with Marsha Hunt, an actress who's now 84," says von Zerneck. "She wrote a book called The Way We Wore: Styles of the 1930s and '40s and Our World Since Then (Marsha Hunt). And we did another signing for Jennifur Brandt's Life Is a Movie Starring You (Warner)." Other authors who've signed at the store over the years include Gore Vidal, Ray Bradbury, April Smith, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, and Carolyn See.

Meanwhile, the small-town aspect of this Hollywood-adjacent store is exemplified by some of its special events -- and the further special events which sometime ensue. "We have game nights," says von Zerneck, "where people have to guess the names of each others' favorite authors. And we've had two marriages come out of those!" -- Tom Nolan

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