Man: Los Angeles is a city of readers.

They love books.

Man two: The Angel City Press, a wonderful producer of marvelously illustrated books, has also a political purpose, making a community.

Woman: When I design a book, I'm solving a puzzle.

Woman two: Like, how do I know that it's gonna look great?

We're making thousands of these.

Woman: The publisher has to be responsible for making the whole book work.

Woman two: I just keep telling everybody "I'm gonna get this on the bestseller list or die trying."

♪ Announcer: This program was made possible in part by: a grant from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture; the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

[Light switch clicks] Man: Well, as we all know, texts going back 5,000, 6,000 years are still with us.

One of the reasons for putting words on paper between covers is that they tend to last.

As we well know, books can be burned, they can be banned, they can be locked away, but in their essence, a book gives permanent shape to thought, makes it available over the years, over the centuries, even over the millennia.

A book is far more than just a processed wood product, right?

It is a vessel traveling through time that we can pick up, open, and enter into that historical moment, enter into that mind, enter into that way of thinking and way of being.

♪ Man: One of the things that I've told people since I've been here--and of course being city librarian, going to all 73 of our libraries, going to every neighborhood and every corner of the city, I get to learn a lot about L.A.--L.A. is a place of constant, endless discovery.

These books help shape our understanding of L.A., and I think back to a recent book opening for the book "L.A.

Painter."

Those book openings are an opportunity to learn something about Los Angeles that you didn't know before, to see Los Angeles through someone else's eyes, and as someone who's relatively new to Los Angeles--I've been here almost 11 years--I just soak that up.

I love talking to people about their experience in L.A. and how they think about Los Angeles.

I think people might think of New York and some other cities as more book cities.

Los Angeles is a city of readers.

They love books.

Terri: If you want to get a sense of the preconceived notions of Los Angeles, all you have to do is open the "New York Times" style section, where they say the craziest things about L.A. Josh: One thing that gets all L.A. to unite together is when there's a really badly done "New York Times" piece about Los Angeles.

Like, that and a Lakers victory.

[Cheering] [Bang] Terri: We're often cast off as, like, the vapid sibling to New York, like New York is where the heavyweights are and Los Angeles is where you go to cash in.

Josh: And if that's all the things that people think, then why are you all moving here, you know?

If Williamsburg is that great, stay there.

I've been really just in my lifetime really blown away with how there's been this kind of paradigm shift in L.A. storytelling.

The kind of real stories of Los Angeles, they're not marginalized anymore, and if you're not listening to those, that's on you, but the stories are there.

[Cars driving] Man: Oh, wow.

Man two: What's going on?

Hey, man.

What's up?

Woman: Good to see you.

Man two: Looks incredible.

I mean, and it's so different, you know, from looking at it on a screen to now seeing it at scale.

Writing this book has been like being a 20-year-old again and making hip-hop music, collaborating on, like, beats, the lyrics, the layout, the narrative.

It's been an experience of, like, joy from beginning to end.

Ben: I mean, like when family had discussions that were a little too hard to listen to, I would go to the library, and so books are kind of a fun place to dream when horror is happening around you sometimes, you know.

Taj: Ben from the forefront said, "Here are experiences, here are images, here are people."

There was never any sense of, like, restriction about what to do.

It was definitely like, "I'm opening a world to share with you."

You know, and when you're making music, it's the same thing.

You might make a song, but you got to take it to a sound engineer.

You got to take it to a mixer, and you got to trust those people because they hear things and they see things in a way that you don't hear and see.

Yeah, we had an idea, and it's been transformed by everybody who's participated in it in ways that have made it way more rich, exciting, far more textured, and I'm excited to see how other people experience it.

Josh: You know, when I heard that Taj and Ben were working on this project, I just immediately was like, "Look.

If you're gonna do a book, you know, there's lots of places you could go for sure, but I think Angel City could be a really interesting place," and also, frankly and honestly, you know, Angel City, I think, throughout the history of their work, hadn't done a lot of work on Black Los Angeles, and I think that they know that.

D.J.

: Well.

When Angel City Press began in 1992, Paddy Calistro and Scott McAuley, there was very little about Los Angeles that made its way into the popular imagination except perhaps Hollywood exposes and actor as-told-to biographies.

Los Angeles as a place was difficult to imagine, hard to see, and what Angel City Press has done over 150 books over 25 years is to consistently look at Los Angeles, to look at its past, to look at its problems, but also at its joys, at what the city means in many dimensions, and this has been a powerful tool for mirroring Los Angeles to the rest of the world and showing Los Angeles to ourselves.

Terri: There are a million stories in Los Angeles, and some of them connect, and some of them don't.

Some of them are only tied together by the fact that they all happen in this geographic area, but at the same time, it's all indistinguishable from the story of L.A. Paddy: Did you see this thing about Almodovar?

He's now doing a movie with sexual tension.

Scott: This should be a book, this book about--a whole article about wind power.

We've been here long enough that that tree we planted, and it looks like it's been here forever, which I guess 35 years is forever.

Paddy: We worked with a garden designer for this, a woman who interestingly loves California history and collects books about California history.

They gave us these pillars, which just sort of worked perfectly in the garden.

Even the garden is about our books.

Ernie Marquez is now 99 years old, so his son, who's an arborist, as a gift, brought us a persimmon tree.

Another aspect of Angel City Press growing in our garden.

It's funny.

I never thought about it, you know, just because all of our authors are like family in a way.

Josh: You know, we could have tried to pitch like Rizzoli, or we could have pitched Crown, or we could have pitched any of these big publishing houses that are far more--have far more capacity to crank out expensive, big coffee table books, but when we realized like, "Oh, Angel City is right here.

There's an L.A. Publishing house who has a history telling L.A. stories," and then when I met Scott and Paddy and, you know, went to their house and realized, like, not only is this an independent, small publishing company, but it's literally--literally mom and pop--like, it is Paddy Mom and Scott Pop making this thing go round--was all the more special.

Paddy: I was a journalist.

I started out writing for the "Los Angeles Times."

I was fashion and beauty writer.

I remember when I first went to work for the "L.A. Times" it was because there was a wonderful woman Dorothy Harrington, who was retiring, and she was 65, and I was 25 probably, and I remember thinking, "Jeez.

When I'm 65, I don't want to be writing about lipstick."

Scott: My background is I went to business school, learned about businessy stuff, accounting, finance, and information systems and fell into information system consulting.

Working on projects was great.

There's--if you look at the history of information processing and all that kind of stuff, you'll see a bunch of photographs of nerdy-looking people standing around awkwardly and very little in the way of, you know, real ephemera like we put in our books.

Paddy: I think I'm kind of the adventurer, and he's like a, what, right brain?

Scott: Well, left--whatever.

Left, right.

Paddy: Whatever the numbers are, that's what he is.

Scott: We are really different people, but I think, you know, a lot of people who are attracted to each other are attracted because they're not attracted to themselves.

They don't want a clone of themselves in their life.

Certainly we don't have that.

Paddy: We certainly don't have that.

By May of 1993, we had our first book, which was "Hollywood du Jour."

It was a collection of little histories of restaurants that no longer existed and their best-selling recipes.

Scott: Doing "Hollywood du Jour" was a way of introducing us to the idea about there's memories of things that are still here, that are no longer here.

We revisited that when we did "To Live and Dine in L.A." with the LAPL's menu collection, what, 25 years later.

Paddy: So it was from a very simple book, "Hollywood du Jour," to a much more historically oriented book that talked about the culture of Los Angeles, and I think if any two books represent what has happened to our company over the years, those two really are perfect.

Josh: I wrote 3 books for Angel City Press that were all based on the special collections of Los Angeles Public Library.

At an early age, I started collecting things, was about collecting stories and also about collecting myself.

Like, it was through the objects that I figured out who I was in relationship to these both imaginary and real stories that were housed in these objects.

"Songs in the Key of L.A." started when Ken Brecher was just starting at the time as the head of the Library Foundation, and Ken knew that I had done a lot of work on music history and music archives, and one day, he was fresh on the job, and he was looking at the special collections, and he called me, and he said, "You know, would you want to do a music project based on the archives of the library?"

I said, "Of course.

It'd be fantastic."

I said, "Well, let me come look at it," and I came in, and there's thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces of sheet music and songbooks, and as I started looking at it, started to realize that there was a history there that I could just kind of sense, so I created a class at USC, where I teach, and had some students come with me, and we actually spent a year going through--I don't know what--it's close to 100,000, I think, pieces of sheet music and songbooks.

It was so nonscientific, nonmethodical.

It was just alphabetical.

A is really helpful because we got lots of angel songs and "Angel Town" and "City of Angels" and all those kinds of things, and it just became this project, where we wanted to create the first ever archive of L.A. sheet music.

The question became, like, "Who's gonna publish?

Like, who in their right mind is gonna publish a book of old sheet music?"

And when I learned about Angel City Press, the idea that there was this this publishing house that only wanted to tell Southern California stories and really wanted to tell L.A. stories, this was the obvious choice, but really for me, the best part of Angel City Press is the design process.

Amy: My name is Amy Inouye, and I'm a book designer.

Ha ha ha!

That's literally how I really describe myself.

Simple.

Josh: She brings, like--always just had, like, surprise ideas or interesting choices, you know, or would, like, have stuff that was even cooler than what we might have in the book, like, in a drawer somewhere.

Like, she also collects lots of stuff.

Amy: This is basically storage and gallery space.

I love vending machines.

So our friend Dan made this sculpture of a gambling ship.

Continuing with our vending machine theme, this is, of course, a big chicken that I found out once lived at the Santa Monica Pier.

OK.

These are some of the books I've designed for Angel City Press.

I've done something like 70 books for Angel City.

Paddy: Amy is one of the most creative people I've ever met.

She looks at something with a very quiet, unemotional approach and then comes back with a design that just knocks your socks off.

Josh: I worked hand in hand with Amy on every project, where, you know, I could come in and she'd show me a mockup, and I'd go home, and I'd come back the next day, she'd show me another mockup.

Amy: When I design a book, I'm solving a puzzle, you know, so there are little things like maybe just colors at the corners or something like that that I think somehow, subconsciously maybe make somebody turn the page.

OK.

So Josh--let's see.

What was the order?

I think this was the first.

I did 3 books with him.

This was all sheet music about California and Los Angeles, and I did things like, for instance, I found a copy of the actual sheet music for this song to use as a gray background.

Next one we did--oop--was the menu book, also a collection at the library.

Josh: I was very much approaching menus as texts.

I was approaching them the same way I would approach holding an LP or holding, you know, a book, of just trying to take this simple object and then figure out, like, what are the stories we can tell about Los Angeles through these very humble, you know, very humble objects that have been left behind.

Amy: And then the last one we did was "The Autograph Book."

Actually sent sheets of Los Angeles Public Library letterhead to different celebrities and famous people and asked people for an autograph and a note to be sent back, and that was the basis of the autograph collection.

Josh: I just thought that idea felt very L.A. On the one hand, I want celebrity, right?

I want people who count, but then it got me thinking more about really the first two books, about what was driving them, which was this sense of people's history.

I thought, "What if we flip that and we make the whole book about whose stories have been erased?"

So we in a way started the autograph project again, and we re-created the stationery, and we had autograph day.

Amy: So they asked for new autographs, which this is Josh's daughter.

Then they tied in sort of modern stuff, you know, graffiti art, writing, and also this street art stuff.

Josh: Like, that impulse that we all have of signing our name on something so that it might outlive us, and that just, I thought, you know, kind of became a really beautiful and powerful idea that fueled that project.

I think in general the celebration of public memory but even I think deeper than that, the conservation and activation of public memory is crucial for social survival.

It's crucial for the sustainability of communities.

Without the drive to preserve public memory, structures of power far too easily can just pretend you're not there, and in pretending you're not there can build on top of you.

♪ Taj: For this book, it really didn't begin with an idea of "Let's write a book."

It began with "Let's talk."

That first conversation, we probably talked for two-plus hours, and we really only covered information about his parents, and so I said I want to follow up, and we ended up having, you know--it ended up turning into multiple conversations over the course of 4 or 5 months, and it was probably somewhere into the fourth or fifth month that I said, "Ben, have you ever considered writing a book?"

And Ben, you know, as always, threw it back at me.

"Would you be interested in working on a book?"

And I said, "Definitely with you," and Ben's response was, "Well, you know, if I were to work on a book, I wouldn't want it to be about--about me, you know.

In many ways, I'm a product of all of these other people, and I feel like the work that I've contributed to has been the work of a community, so I would really want to tell a story about more than just me."

Host: And now Ben Caldwell.

Ben: Film is a methodology of telling a story.

Host: Your film brings up a question to me about what exactly Black film language is.

Ben: Everybody thinks they understand it.

Like, if you were reading a novel, it would be telling you the story in words, and so there's--that's a symbol of a visual... but this film actually shows you the image, and it is what it is.

This is a movie that Charles and I worked on.

The first youth that I started working with in this community.

[Drumbeat playing] I made it for a show that was about color and skin, and so I thought it would be interesting to say, "Tell me the first time you noticed you had color."

Ben, in film: Hi.

You're invited to contribute a skin story to our community history project.

Ben: The preservations of stories is extremely important.

They can't necessarily be told through family context because it got so scrambled for 400 years.

I think what we're doing now is unscrambling that and making it better for the next generation of people that live with us, and for us as our families grow, it's really important for them to have a sense of root.

That's the reason I started tackling archiving.

I saw video as really the best thing to capture and freeze an idea of a time period, and so I would just make swoops of the area, knowing that it was gonna change eventually.

It's a kind of a freeze of one time period that changes the instant after you shot it.

Taj: The name of the book is "KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell."

The Idea KAOS Theory, obviously KAOS builds off of the name of Ben's establishment KAOS Network.

It really taps into what Ben has described as this kind of circular aspect of life, and so the book attempts to describe that through the history of Ben and his ancestors and the communities he's been a part of, but we also, I think, use that as a way of speaking about America's history.

D.J.

: I'm a writer of small pieces, of essays, often very short essays.

These are perceptions of the city that are glances at, maybe looking at the city from a somewhat different perspective or taking an incident from the past maybe partially remembered, mostly forgotten, and seeing in that incident in the past something significant about what the city was, what the city is today.

Woman: This way.

Welcome, welcome.

Let me just go up.

My name is Frances Anderton, and I have spent many years reporting, broadcasting pretty much on design and architecture.

Paddy: I'd always been a fan of Frances when she was on the radio.

When she pitched this book about apartment living in Los Angeles, I listened.

Terri: You know, Frances sometimes jokes like, "Oh, who would have thought you'd want to publish this book about multifamily housing?"

It's like, "Of course we want to publish this book about multifamily housing.

Who else?

Like, that's why we're here, to do this coffee table book about multifamily housing."

Frances: The owner-occupied single-family home is not available to everybody.

Let's not pretend it is.

Let's instead showcase the really great examples of living in multifamily buildings.

So that was the goal of the book.

In New York, they live in their place, they go to work, and they go to the bar.

New York is so full of social spaces for everyone to use.

That's not the way L.A. evolved.

We have vast areas where there isn't that much of a public realm.

It's in Los Angeles that we have found housing complexes that are centered on social space.

You know, many people know the bungalow courts that became really popular back in the 1910s and 1920s.

In the New Deal period, you find these very large garden apartment complexes that go up, Village Green, Wyvernwood.

There's a whole number of them, and then you go on to today, and even today, I would argue that you're still seeing complexes of housing that are designed around some sort of social space like a court.

It's something that's very satisfying because you're not living on top of each other, but nor are you alone, and L.A. was a place where many people came from somewhere else.

Paddy and Scott may tell this story in a different way, but initially when I first went to them with the book, I didn't really understand how they did the photography.

I had this idea in my head that I was gonna write this book about multifamily housing, I was gonna meet the people that lived in the multifamily housing, and I was gonna take my own pictures, and it was going to be kind of gonzo, you know, photography of multifamily housing in L.A., and I would do it on my iPhone while I was interviewing them.

Then I guess I assembled a bunch of photographs that I had taken on the iPhone and sent them off to them.

They rejected every single one of them and said, "We aren't using your photos.

These are terrible.

Come back with better pictures," but some of my photos sort of somehow wound up in the folder that then built up over several months, and then when the actual picture list started to emerge, they were making choices, and I was making choices.

There were some of my photos, and in fact, a couple of my photos that I thought they'd rejected out of hand wound up being spread across a double-page spread, and I'd say, "Why are we using this photo that you said you didn't want?"

Well, somehow that part of the process had been buried in the mists of time.

There were my photos appearing in the book, and that was definitely an unexpected twist in the whole process.

Paddy: But in some cases, you have to make a decision about a photo and how important it is for that photo to be in the book if it's not a particularly great photo.

As you can see, it's not a great photo.

It's really old, but for the collectors of Hollywood memorabilia, who will buy this book, that's an incredible image.

Do we just go with it?

And we decided, yes, that our readers who are collectors will be really thrilled to see that.

Frances: There were some amazing photos.

Paul Vu, Art Gray, Tim Street-Porter, Caitlin Atkinson, Eric Staudenmaier.

I mean, there's some wonderful photographers in there, and I am so happy that their photographs are there telling this story of multifamily housing in L.A. Taj: The writing process, I have to say, wasn't hard, you know.

It was a lot of fun.

It was very therapeutic.

It was great to be able to write with Ben, and Ben would say things that would then illuminate so much for a chapter, you know, where I was like, "That's the nugget right there."

Oh, and that's the nugget that these people's experiences are describing, but I didn't really know what the anchor of the nugget was, and Ben just conveyed that in a few words, in a proverb describing dreaming.

Ben: The book really deals with a migration story.

I think Taj and I ended up seeing the journey of my people--were really on a constant search to create a village of some sort, and I'm kind of a portion of that dream of when they were taken as chattel from Mississippi and forced to live in Texas and then after leaving Texas, then trying to come to the West Coast, you know, and that's just quite fascinating to me to just see how a group of people had to live here in the United States and how they adjusted and then their journey on the migration.

You live the life, but to then reflect on it, and, you know, I'm a mature man now, so that reflection of almost 7 different manifestations of Ben, you know, it's been kind of fun looking at it.

There is a methodology and a structure that I feel just as music has a structure, just as our writing has a structure.

The structure that we know of now is basically the structure of the inventors of this particular medium that we have known as film.

It was born in a Western world.

It's very similar to Beethoven, and that's all we're hearing right now, so now I'm trying to get off into African languages like Zulu, Yoruba, and languages like that and checking out the syntax and checking out the structure and see if there's some kind of similarities that--that I can transfer into film visually.

Man, you ended up getting this crazy police footage.

Taj: There or something?

Ben: Yeah, I think so.

It's because we have that replica.

Man: This book is actually kind of an amalgamation of, like, all the things we know how to do, and again, without that freedom that Ben and Taj gave us, you know, it wouldn't look like this.

It would be more linear.

Like this--even though the narrative may be linear, like, the experience of this book is more immersive and nonlinear in my opinion.

People can engage in different ways.

They can enter the book at different places and still glean different bits of information.

You know, putting the effort into making spreads extra compelling is just tapping into Ben's energy basically.

It's like how would Ben make a book?

Because Ben could design his own book for sure, and it would be it would be wild.

He trusted us, and he's like, "These people are in the same tribe."

We just tapped in.

Taj: So, yeah, we had a meeting with our design crew, you know, Studio ELLA.

They're showing us the prelims.

Ben and I are nodding our heads like this but giving each other little pounds, like, "All right.

This is gonna work.

This is looking good," and then they throw at us this major curveball of--so the book was supposed to be a 7x9.

They said, you know--you know, we have the 7x9, but we really think an 8x10 would allow this stuff to pop even more.

Ben's like, "I like it."

He's like--he's like, he's like, "It works," and then I'm like, "Well, we got to call Terri."

Ha ha ha!

I'm presuming from their standpoint, like, you know, however many thousands of books, that's not--that's additional dollars.

So, you know, I messaged Terri, and she's like, "What?

All right.

I'm actually about to go speak with Paddy right now, you know."

I'm like, "All right.

Well, I'll keep my fingers crossed," and half-hour later, she's like, "Paddy said, 'Let's do it.'"

Ben: I see it as synchronicity.

I see it as there's nothing you can do about synchronicity except the flow with it just like surfing.

You know, it's like once you get on the idea of--and then you have to follow that flow, and we just happened to find a good wave in with this project.

[Doorbell ringing] Paddy: Oh, that must be Taj and Ben.

Scott: Hi.

Good to meet you.

Taj: How you doing?

Thank you for having us.

[Laughter] Good to finally meet you all.

Paddy: Hi, Ben.

I need a hug.

Terri: It's so good to see you.

Paddy: So that's the half.

Terri: This is the half title page, and you'll notice that there's no full title page.

Taj: In the first galley that was a bit long, they had this with a staggered kind of look.

It was a bit more interesting aesthetically.

Terri: It was just a little bit more in the design of it and the layout, and that's something that we've kind of asked for throughout is for them to do a little bit more with the text.

People always think I'm a video editor because I live in L.A., and I say like, "Oh, I'm an editor," and they're like, "Oh, what are you working on?"

It's like not what you're asking about.

Yeah.

I was really nervous when I went there for the first time because I'd never met or spoken to Scott and Paddy before I started my internship.

All our communication had been over e-mail, and so when I walked up to their door the first time, I was just nervous.

I'd never really had an office job before, and I just thought, like, "What is this gonna be like?"

And Paddy opened the door with her big smile and just gave me a hug, and then we went and sat down at her kitchen table, and I just instantly felt like I was at home, this was my book family.

Paddy: We talked earlier about how we met you.

Terri: Oh, yeah?

Paddy: I told that story.

When she was an intern, she worked on our book about cannery row, and she rewrote it.

Scott: Right.

Paddy: The author was indeed very passionate, but he wasn't a writer, so Terri, still in college at Pitzer College in Claremont, sat down and rewrote that book.

Terri: You know, on the basic level, we edit, and people tend to think that that means that I'm going through somebody's manuscript with a red pen and fixing the commas and adjusting the spelling, but what we really do is we work with the author from the proposal stage and the conception of a book to develop it.

We have a problem with the proof.

It printed wrong on the proof, and so now I'm trying to deal with the printer to see what the problem is there.

There's something really stressful about the fact that this is what you have, you know, and then they say like, "Oh, the holographic foil is gonna look great," and you're like, "OK, but swear that it'll look great.

Like, how do I know that it's gonna look great?"

We're making thousands of these, and I need it to look amazing.

Interviewer: Right.

Taj: Best thing you could say about any kind of experience like this is if you say, like, "I actually came out making, like, a new friend in the process," you know, like, and I feel like that's the kind of relationship I've been able to cultivate with Terri.

I've talked about you so much.

I was like, "Ebony needs to meet Terri."

Terri: Oh, yeah.

I really--I am excited about that, too.

Hi!

Ebony: Thank you.

It's so nice to meet you.

Terri: It's so nice to meet you, too.

How are you doing?

Taj: Ebony has said to me on multiple occasions, like, "Before you do that, ask Terri."

Heh heh heh.

Terri: Ha ha ha!

Thank you.

That's good advice.

That's good advice.

Taj: Definitely, when you look at this book, you will see Ben, you will see Taj, you will see Stephen, you will see River, but probably the person who people aren't aware of that is also very much ever present in this book, too, in terms of its creative process is Terri.

Terri: There isn't an issue with it.

I've just been going back and forth with the printer about how exactly we're gonna set it up because normally we use a scuff-resistant lamination, and the foil goes underneath, but we're worried if we use that process it will dampen too much of the holographic effect.

You're bringing something into the world with somebody.

You're making something that didn't exist before.

It's a tremendous responsibility that these people invest with us.

And the images are so beautiful that I think having a little bit of shine to them will really bring them out and make them pop off the cover a little bit.

Taj: I love it.

I mean, you know I trust you, so I'm all for it.

I mean, whatever you think we need to do to get the kind of, you know, drawing power to somebody moving through a bookstore or, you know, some space, I'm all for it.

Terri: Any time somebody signs a book contract with me, they're saying that they trust me to take their life's work, their passion, and help them bring it into the world and make it a reality.

Paddy: I think that Taj Robeson and Ben Caldwell's new book, "KAOS Theory" is an example of a shift in the Angel City Press legacy.

It's the transitionary book.

We've given it over to Terri Accomazzo.

The book looks different.

Taj has this great energy that is new and hip and cool, which I am not, and Ben has just an imagination that has been there always throughout his career.

Putting in QR codes, that's just of this era, and so this book speaks to the present.

Terri: It's such a great idea, and it works so well for this book because you can see here we have a spread of all these different stills from one of Ben's films, but it doesn't really capture the essence of Ben's work.

You don't get a sense of the timing, of the texture that exists in some of these films, so by being able to just point your camera over a QR code and actually see the film, it really brings Ben's work to life and makes everything so much more real.

Woman: ♪ Moving L.A. hip-hop Papa Amadou's about to give It straight now And we're gonna do it My style ♪ [Man rapping in Spanish] Taj: History books have stayed pretty conventional, you know, in terms of the form, the look of it.

It's like you have the images in the middle.

That's where they might be willing to spend a little bit of money with color, right in the middle of the book, not throughout, and that obviously has to do with the economics of that industry, as well as in terms of what they're used to.

So for me, I think we wanted to push back against that to give people a book that hopefully produces a different kind of experience and relationship with quote unquote "history."

Terri: And we had some people over here the other day, who are just friends of mine, and I had these proofs on my desk, and they were saying like, "Oh, this book looks so different from most Angel City Press books."

In a way it does, right?

We've used a different designer.

We've done some more unusual things with it, but I also think there's a lot of continuity with it because it's still this really visual exploration of the city of Los Angeles and all the beauty that exists in it, so it's an evolution, not necessarily like a revolution in what we've been trying to do this whole time.

Interviewer: When you hear the word "coffee table book," what do you think?

D.J.

: Ha ha ha!

Well, I understand that coffee table book has a pejorative ring to a book that no one reads but maybe someone occasionally looks at while they're waiting for the coffee to be served.

I would prefer to think of many of the books that Angel City Press publishes as illustrated histories.

Terri: We don't ever publish a book that's just all photos and captions and isn't really saying anything.

We want all of our books to be a contribution to the conversation in the city, and so sometimes, I'll describe them to people as art books or something like that because they're not just meant to be something that an interior designer buys to stick in your house and call it finished.

They really are meant to be read and savored by people who care about the city.

Taj: The book begins in Leimert Park Village, and, you know, if anyone who watches this has been to L.A., I'm sure they know that L.A. is just the term that describes a whole bunch of different villages that blur into one another.

Terri: Some of the earlier books that Paddy and Scott did aren't necessarily about L.A., or they're not always historical in basis.

Now we really try to publish books that tell a story about the social and cultural history of Los Angeles.

It's really important to me that all of our books be a contribution to the conversation that's happening in the city.

Ben: You know, for almost 15 years at Cal Arts, I taught a class that was dealing with the disparate villages in Los Angeles, and so what we would do is talk about the prescript and then see how it was different in real reality.

So, you know, Hollywood is glitz and in glamor, right?

But you go to the real place, does it look like that?

No.

Go to East L.A.

There's a bunch of shooting and Latinos.

You'd think it was gonna be bad, but you go there, you find that there's just blue-collar, real hard-working families.

Same thing in Watts.

So this is a quite unique place with all these villages, and I love--you know, love the place for that reason, but it's also a problem, right, because these villages don't always communicate with each other.

Taj: Mm-hmm.

Terri: We want to reflect the city back to the people who live here or to the people who care about Los Angeles a really true vision of what it's like to live here and be from here or move here.

D.J.

: Voters don't make good decisions about the future of their community unless they know something about its past.

Angel City Press, a wonderful producer of marvelously illustrated books about all sorts of things, has also a political purpose at least for me, and the political purpose is making a community.

Taj: But before we can even work, we have to be able to actually see and actively listen to each other, even if we disagree, and so, yeah, I think that's one of the things that books potentially can do.

Ben: I see the book as a kind of a treasure chest of cultural ideas and concepts that shows how we thought at this time in history and hopefully will make it where we can see the commonality of how things happen so we can better work together as people, you know.

On a real side, on the idealistic side, I think of it that way.

Interviewer: Are you proud of it?

Terri: Oh, my God!

I'm so proud of it.

It's like my baby.

I mean, it's really Taj and Ben's baby, but it's, like, maybe a niece or a nephew, you know?

I feel so strongly about it, and I just keep telling everybody "I'm gonna get this on the bestseller list or die trying."

I just really want everyone to see it because I'm enormously proud of it.

It was a privilege to work with Taj and Ben absolutely and a joy.

Man: That card if you have any more questions.

Thank you.

[Indistinct chatter] Man: Let's go.

Frances: What can I say?

It was great to run into a fellow multifamily housing enthusiast, who's standing right behind you.

Man: It's E-t-a-n. Frances: Yes.

Etan: Wonderful.

Best of luck the rest of the day.

Frances: I'll take a bow.

Ha ha ha!

Woman: I lived in Europe, in Italy when I was a kid for a few years.

I went to school in San Francisco.

I've traveled around the country.

I've spent a lot of time in New York and in Eastern cities.

Those places are very easy to grasp, but L.A. isn't like that.

L.A. is a very difficult city to become personal with, and I know a few New Yorkers who hate L.A., and they're so proud of it, you know, and I always say to them, "I don't get it," because I love New York.

I love New York.

Why do they make fun of us?

Why do they hate us?

But I think it's because it is a very difficult city to grasp, but to me, that's why I love it, because it's so...free.

Interviewer: So I've also heard a little bit about your image grid.

Scott: OK. Ha ha!

Oh, so the image grid.

Amy: Scott--OK.

He's a spreadsheet guy.

Terri: Who talked to you about Scott's image grid?

Man: Is that what you call it?

I don't know what it was.

Kun: To be honest with you, I think that I have a little PTSD from that part of the publishing process.

Scott: I have a column in the spreadsheet that says, "What is the description of this picture?"

Man: Why are you smiling?

Scott: But people don't-- Paddy: Because everybody hates--everybody hates the spreadsheet.

Scott: Well, with one exception, but... Paddy: With one exception.

Him.

Frances: Yes, that's right, and his image grid is quite an extraordinary document.

Have you seen his image grid?

Terri: Would you like to see it?

Interviewer: Yes.

Terri: So here, you can see we have many columns.

I think there are, like, 15 tabs.

It's complex.

I think what has given the image spreadsheet its fame, let's say, is just that there's a lot of information, and a lot of it is very jargony.

It's not stuff that the author would be familiar with.

So there's a column that says, "Book Loc."

I understand that this means that it's chapter and then section, but to the author, it's like gobbledygook until we walk them through it.

Paddy: The publisher has to be responsible for making the whole book work, and that's what this spreadsheet accomplishes.

It may not need to be as complex as ours is because Scott is a very complex thinker, and some authors understand that perfectly.

Others, who are more like me probably, think, "Oh, my God!

This spreadsheet."

It's what makes the book happen.

Nikki High: My name is Nikki High, and I'm the owner of Octavia's Bookshelf.

When I was coming up, I was raised in Pasadena.

When I started to explore books outside of what was required reading in high school, prior to that, I hadn't really had any experience reading books by people who look like me, and I just felt that I needed to create that space here.

I'm on a mission.

I want to create spaces that I wish I had access to when I was growing up.

Oh, man.

It's gorgeous.

"Generally, Chinese would ignore the issue."

Look at that.

"Certificate of identity for Chinese residents."

Again, I always say it's such a gift that people like writers, they are natural observers.

I mean, it definitely wouldn't have been on my radar let's just say that.

Like, I'm always so grateful that people take the time to tell these stories and how important they are.

Interviewer: Arthur, thanks for coming down with us tonight.

Arthur: Yeah, yeah, my pleasure.

It's my second home.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Yeah.

Why is that?

I mean, I see a lot of really cool stuff on the walls.

Arthur: Yeah.

Well, you know, I look around, and back in 2018, 2019, this was a mess.

It was under construction, and I was brought in, and the owner said, "You know, we'd like to honor the Chinese in Hollywood, that story here in this particular room."

I said, "Well, what a challenge this would be for this particular venue, for the Formosa Cafe."

I knew that I could only tell so much of the story before it gets lost.

My name's Arthur Dong.

I'm a filmmaker, curator, educator, writer.

My work focuses mainly on the LGBTQ community and Asian-American community, telling stories about their people and our history.

Paddy: Arthur Dong is an amazing, creative person.

Obviously, he's been a filmmaker for many years.

He also is this incredible historian about a culture that he lived, and so I really listened to him very, very carefully as he talked about the Chinese culture in film, and I realized here is a man who has been studying this since he was a little boy, and that's our perfect author.

Arthur: My career as a filmmaker has always been about social change, and what I've learned is to create social change and to really spur social change, you have to get all the tools you can get to tell the story of the Chinese in Hollywood and create some kind of change in terms of how we are represented and how we work in Hollywood.

With my movies, my exhibitions, and my live presentations, they all happen in real time, but with a book, it's something that you can take with you.

It's a real thing.

I mean, you can hold it, and that's what I love about books is that it's this tangible product that in which the story is being told to you under your control.

So I produced the film "Hollywood Chinese," and it was released in 2007.

With my research and my personal collection, I amassed a lot of stuff, a lot of archival material, ephemera, which all had to do with how the Chinese were constructed in terms of imagery in Hollywood films, so I thought this would just make a terrific book.

Nikki: And you ask why books are important.

Like, this is why, and, I mean--you can't engage in, like, this level of, I don't know, information staring at a computer, to just be able to do this and to look at it and what catches your eye.

Like, there's so many little details.

Aruthur: I think from the very beginning of cinema history in this country the Chinese image was less than positive.

It was definitely not respected and treated as foreign.

For "Hollywood Chinese," I wanted to make a coffee table book.

So much of the images in it says so much about how the Chinese image was constructed, and I wanted to give that luxury to a readership, to people who might be interested in studying these images further and to look at them further and try to understand, OK, what was MGM trying to do when they were marketing Luise Rainer as a Chinese peasant?

What was Fox--20th Century Fox doing when they were marketing and putting out these stills about Charlie Chan and the 40 films that Charlie Chan starred in?

Coffee table books for me means you can sit there at your table, flip through it, spend time with it, take a break, walk away, think about what you just absorbed in the imagery and text, and come back to it.

Nikki: You know, having books that tell stories about all of our experiences and how broad those experiences are, it's going to be more important now than ever because there is a whole subset of people in other states who won't even have access to these books because they can't be in their school library or their public library.

Why do they want to take these books away from us?

Why don't they want these stories to exist?

There must be something there, and what it is is our experience, our lived experiences, our storytelling, our history, our trauma, our joys.

To me, it's an effort to take away our humanity because if we can't tell our stories, you no longer see me as a person.

That's it.

Arthur: When I was introduced to Angel City Press, I found a kindred spirit in terms of telling stories, not being affected by money or the larger industries or the big Hollywood scene, but really looking at culture and story and how it's germane to L.A. and how do we bring out different aspects of neighborhoods and different stratas of culture and explore that in a book.

It's gratifying to know that, although the book was published a couple of years ago, we swept the Oscars with "Everything Everywhere All at Once," and we're a part of that conversation, and it's exciting, and I'm not sure how much the book has to do with anything that's happening today, but I'd like to see it as one of the chapters in this long continuum of a struggle of being a part of what we should be a part of, and that is this very important cultural institution called film.

Nikki: So here's the thing.

If you know me, if you--if I know you, I'm gonna be--I'm not gonna hurt you.

I think the more that we're able to tell stories and read stories and really celebrate the gift of writers, that they're able, you know, to put it on pen and paper in a way that touches us, we can bridge together, and once we do that, like, that's gonna be so powerful.

Can you imagine what we can do if we all treated each other as human beings?

Arthur: OK.

The other day, Paddy out of the blue gave me a call.

She goes, "I wanted to tell you something."

I said, "Oh, no.

What?"

"Scott and I are retiring."

I thought, "OK." "And we're being absorbed by the Los Angeles Public Library."

John: Following lengthy conversations, Paddy and Scott have chosen to gift Angel City Press to the L.A. Public Library.

Terri: It is a unique situation.

I think this is gonna be the first time that a library has ever had its own publishing program.

Arthur: They better not mess this up because--you know, Angel City Press has been here a long time, right?

Kun: There's something about Angel City Press donating the company to the public library that's, like, so on brand.

Like, it's something that you're like, "That doesn't really make much financial sense," because that's not how they roll.

That's not how they think.

Paddy: We didn't want to sell Angel City Press because we didn't want a buyer to pick and choose which titles they would take.

That's what happens when you sell a publishing company.

Our book children are our family.

You know, they've been a part of our lives, and we didn't want some selected and some rejected.

Frances: They are handing off directorship of the company to Terri Accomazzo, who was my editor on the book.

She's everybody's editor.

She's a really gifted editor.

Paddy: Knowing that Terri is leading the company with her own vision, it couldn't be more wonderful for us.

Terri: So I'll be staying on doing pretty much everything that I'm doing now except that I'll be reporting in to the library instead of in to Paddy and Scott.

Kun: Their deep connection to L.A. public history in a way has become somewhat inseparable from the work of the L.A. Public Library, and certainly, the 3 books we did together cemented that, but I also think it's a perfect fit for the library to say like, well, the library is not just a place where books that are already written go to sit on a shelf, that the library is a place where new books will be written, where new stories are gonna be told, and the library is going to become an activator space, that it's not just a depository, but it's actually a site of production.

It's a site of creativity.

Interviewer: Tell me a little bit about what the next step is for Scott and Paddy.

What's happening?

Terri: I mean, I guess that's a question for Scott and Paddy.

Like, what are they gonna do next?

They're grandparents, so that's gonna play a huge role in what they do, but also because they're like my adopted parents, I don't know what they think retirement is gonna look like for them because I'll be texting them every day forever.

D.J.

: Well, this book "Becoming Los Angeles," initially published in 2020 by Angel City Press, it compiles a lot of writing I did between 2008 and 2018.

It's an attempt to come to grips with the city as it evolved quickly after the year 2000.

It looks to the past.

It looks to the present.

It laments certain things about what Los Angeles has become, but it tries to see some things about Los Angeles that we should strive to remember.

One of the tasks of a writer about Los Angeles is to be present but also to be in the past, and perhaps in the past, we might find some reasons for optimism in the future.

♪ Terri: In my favorite Derek Mahon poem, which is about mushrooms growing up in a shed, "You with your light meter and your relaxed itineraries, let not our naive labors have been in vain," and every time I see this crew, I always think about that with their light meters and I suppose a relaxed itinerary.

You know, it's like let the world kind of see everything that you guys have been doing for all these years.

"Let not our naive labors have been in vain."

Paddy: That's right.

Terri: Yeah.

Paddy: And she does that all the time, quoting poetry to me.

[Laughter] Announcer: This program was made possible in part by: a grant from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture; the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs; and the National Endowment for the Arts.