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Last month, an elderly couple, unable to get rid of their 200 Scientific Ameri-cans, called up Volansky. Bring 'em on down, he said. He bought them for 10 cents a piece, adding to an already overflowing collection.
On the weekend before last, a man dropped off three milk crates full of books. Most were spiritual guides of the New Age variety. There was a decent piece of literature, Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, a modern classic of African-American literature taught at many universities. The copy, however, was badly worn and stained on its cover with what looked uncomfortably like feces. Still, Volansky took them in. All of them.
Why not? He has ample display and storage room. His rent and payroll are minimal. It's easy: Buy cheap, mark up the price, be willing to come down a little to move a book, and let nature takes its course.
The history of McDonald's Books is almost as strange and meandering as its current inventory.
Itzhak's father, Tuvia, bought McDonald's Books in the early '70s from a park ranger who had abandoned his ill-considered idea to be a bookseller. Before the park ranger, the store was owned by an alcoholic who had let the shop go ever since be bought it in the mid-'60s.
The elder Volansky wasn't the person to put McDonald's in order. "I don't recall ever seeing him read a book in his whole life," Itzhak says. To Tuvia books were a commodity, pure and simple. They had no meaning different from what car parts or vegetables meant to mechanics or grocers. He bought in bulk and threw it up on the shelves. And it was out of this disdain and neglect, more than anything, that McDonald's became the bookstore equivalent of the Rorschach test.
It was not always this way. In fact, for several decades, it was quite the opposite.
In 1976, Tuvia hired a Harvard dropout named Mark Jensen, who set about organizing the store into sections, apparently for the first time. Jensen, a book lover of the first order, went on what can rightly be compared to an archaeological dig. Quickly, he unearthed the literary bones of the original owner, Jack Amos "Jock" MacDonald, a saucy old Canadian who loudly recited Byron and Keats as he fixed his morning coffee and who loved few things more than Marxism, books, cigarettes, and scotch. (No one knows why the store's name is spelled differently than the original owner's.)
MacDonald harbored an insatiable appetite for books. He read every kind that came into the store, critiquing them, slipping idiosyncratic reviews on 3-by-5 cards into the pages, and displaying the review-ed volumes in his front window. (The store was originally located at 76 Sixth St.; it moved to Mission Street before landing on Turk in the mid-'50s.)
The one thing MacDonald loved as much as books was radical politics. A die-hard Marxist, he joined and left several radical groups, including the precursor to the Communist Party U.S.A., until he landed in the 1920s with an obscure Socialist group called the Workers Socialist Party (later the World Socialist Party) and stayed a loyal member until his death. The party was so small it could not muster enough members -- it took three -- to found a San Francisco local chapter.
MacDonald served as polemic writer for several radical publications, most frequently The Western Socialist, the official organ of the World Socialist Party. His writings were sharply sarcastic and sorely in need of an editor.
But it's likely he saved his most eloquent writing for the year before he died, 1967, when he wrote a letter, apparently under the influence of a few Haig and Haigs, to his newborn grandson, Craig MacDonald Hamilton of Fairbanks, Alaska.
It begins with a ditty:
Though I revel in Sunny October,
My senses are languishing and vague,
For I simply refuse to stay sober,
While musing on infantile Craig.
MacDonald goes on to welcome his grandson to the world and warn him "that this jittery old globe has many faces; some winsome and beautiful, others false and malevolent."
On the subject of food, MacDonald offered this valuable advice:
Should you find the contents of your bottle to be flat and tasteless, a little dash of scotch in the formula will do wonders in restoring the ambrosial piquancy that the palate craves. I proffer the advice to attach a little note such as -- mix milk for Craig, with a little Haig and Haig -- on the side of your crib. The rhythmical swing of the request is bound to ensure promptness that stolid prose would fail to convey.
As a bookseller, MacDonald was courtly and warm, his bookshop a place of intellectual debate and radical politics. MacDonald obtained banned books such as Lady Chatterly's Lover and Tropic of Cancer and displayed them prominently in a glass case. Rather than pornography, MacDonald peppered the front of the store with radical journals: The Western Socialist, The People's World, The Truth Seeker, and The Atheist.
"He was a great conversationalist," says his daughter, Mary MacDonald. "People came in because they loved talking to him. He could discuss anything. He could take any side of the argument and win it. He was the boss and he called the tune. He studied the Bible and could win any argument on religion. People who were Catholic couldn't believe he wasn't Catholic.
"Whatever you were, you couldn't believe he wasn't one."
A Dickens novel, Bleak House, sits high on a shelf, within sight of the counter at McDonald's Books. Volansky points to it to emphasize the two things about the store he most wants to be known:
