James Fugate, co-owner of Eso Won Books, speaks with California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas while touring businesses in Leimert Park in Los Angeles on Wednesday, June 3, 2020. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times for Associated Press Pool)

Bookseller James Fugate says when Eso Won Books reopened on Wednesday, May 27, sales were a little bit slow, though that was expected after more than two months of coronavirus-mandated closure.

“You know, it was nice,” says Fugate, co-owner with Tom Hamilton of the nationally known African American bookshop in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“Sales weren’t bustling because people were just getting used to the idea that they could come back,” he says. “But we were going along.”

Then on Saturday, May 30, something strange happened, Fugate says.

“On a good day, an incredible day, we’d get maybe 25 orders,” he says of Eso Won’s online sales. “That Saturday, we must have had 400 orders. I thought, ‘Oh, you’ll just stay late, you’ll be working all weekend.’

“Sunday, we had maybe close to 900 orders, and Monday, about 2,300.”

By Tuesday, he and Hamilton decided they had to stop taking new orders for a few days.

The ongoing nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in particular and police violence against blacks and other minorities had fueled both a surge of interest in books on topics such as race and discrimination, as well as a desire to spend money at black-owned businesses to show support for the issues that now dominate the news.

“It must have been a combination of factors,” Fugate says during an initial phone call on Wednesday, June 3, the same day California Gov. Gavin Newsom stopped by Eso Won to say hello and buy a few books in person.

“We’re one of the best African American bookstores in the country, I think,” Fugate says. “And so I think we have a reputation with a lot of people: ‘Oh, that’s one that carries a large selection.’”

And around the same time that sales skyrocketed, a guest on “The Thom Hartmann Program,” a nationally syndicated progressive radio show, also talked about Eso Won, which Fugate says surely contributed, too.

“It’s been amazing to see,” Fugate says. “People are so warm, and they’re excited; they’re happy for us. Even people online, they call and say, ‘I haven’t heard anything about my order.’

“I say, ‘I’m sorry, we’re overwhelmed right now.’ They say, ‘Don’t worry about it at all.’ “

Deep roots

Fugate was working as a bookstore manager at a community college at the end of the ’80s when he, Hamilton, and a third partner who later left, decided to go into business bringing African American books into the community, at first, quite literally.

“Because I was working at Compton College’s bookstore on weekends, we were taking books around on our own,” he says. “We called ourselves Eso Won Books on Wheels.”

Within a year, sometime in 1990, they opened a small store on Slauson Avenue near Crenshaw Boulevard, and over the years they moved a few times to locations on or near La Brea Avenue before settling in Leimert Park around 2006.

“There was a need for a black bookstore in Los Angeles, even though at that time the Aquarian Book Shop was here,” Fugate says. “We wanted a bookstore that carried a wide selection.”

From the start, Eso Won — the name means “water over rocks” in one of Ethiopia’s languages — not only offered that widest of selections but also brought in authors that other Southern California bookstores did not.

“We had Barack Obama, this unknown guy, here for ‘Dreams From My Father,’” Fugate says of the 1995 memoir Obama wrote before almost anyone outside of Chicago knew his name. “Then in ’07, we had him as a senator for his book “Audacity of Hope.’

“First signing we had 10 people, but five of them work in the bookstore. The second signing we had 900 people.”

Mystery writer Walter Mosley has been there many times as have luminaries from poet Maya Angelou to former President Bill Clinton.

Amazon, with its discounted prices and easy access, hit Eso Won like it did most other indie bookshops, but Fugate says the selection and the knowledge of the staff have held their own against the algorithms of the online sellers.

“We read a lot of the books we carry, or we have an opinion about them and will tell people,” he says. “The popular books, you know, what you used to sell maybe 100 copies of Eric Jerome Dickey, you may only sell four copies.

“But a book like ‘The Isis Papers’ by Frances Cress Welsing, you’re not going to find that anywhere else,” Fugate says.

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