An Afternoon at Stout Books

We’re deep in the store rooms underneath San Francisco institution William Stout Architectural Books, and Erik Heywood, the Senior Director of Retail at the Eames Institute, holds up a box of very old chocolates to show off their immaculate typography and product design. He sets it back down among the other tchotchkes — cigarette packets, candy wrappers, and detergent labels — that constituted, somewhat improbably, the working archive of inspiration of the late graphic designer Paul Rand, who designed the logos of IBM and UPS among many others.

These are actual objects from Rand's personal collection, sent over by a friend who'd been given access to his estate. “It's so hard to do this kind of design well,” Erik says. “To make these everyday products so full of charm, colour, interest, proportion, consideration, beauty, intention. You'll never beat that.”

Stout Books is full of these kinds of treasures. It's the type of store you can get lost in, especially when given a tour of the archives and basements, which are overflowing with rarities waiting to be processed for the shop floor. It’s a maze of books, magazines, new and old, rare and common. Erik has been part of the team running Stout Book since 2022, when his other employer in SF, the Eames Institute, took over the bookshop after the eponymous William Stout, its founder, retired.

“It's so hard to do this kind of design well. To make these everyday products so full of charm, colour, interest, proportion, consideration, beauty, intention. You'll never beat that.”

The store was founded in 1974 by William — Bill to his friends — a practicing architect whose work as a bookseller grew out of a simple and pure love of the medium, and has endured as one of the few bookstores in the US still dedicated to architecture and design. And of those few it’s easily the best. Tucked away at 804 Montgomery Street in the shadow of the modernist monolith of the Transamerica Pyramid, right in the heart of Downtown San Francisco, for decades it occupied a particular and well-loved place in the city's cultural life. Its shelves a haven for the city’s architects and designers, and also anyone with a passing interest in creativity, inspiring generation after generation.

Erik moved to the city fourteen years ago, from New York, somewhat by accident. He had been in New York for many years, and running Book/Shop since 2011, a design-leaning concept store and rare book dealership, inspired, he explains, by the idea that “books are a way of life” more than a product to be sold. In 2018 he hosted The One-Hour Rare Book School at Drake's store NYC, and spent time working with Andy Spade and furniture company USM. “Retail is like an artform,” he says.

Erik got married and followed his wife out west from New York. "The world is wide," he jokes. "And we just kind of came out here." He ended up working for the Eames Institute, based in Richmond. When Bill was considering retiring, the institute stepped in to take over the store, and keep it going. And he was tasked with bringing new life and charting a new future for the store.

It’s a delicate operation to keep the flame going of such a beloved space, and one that comes with a lot of pressure. “People will always fear the worst, and the only way you can disprove those fears is by doing a good job. You can say you're not going to change anything, but they'll know if you do. And also some things do need to change, for the right reasons. Not all change is bad."

“People will always fear the worst, and the only way you can disprove those fears is by doing a good job. You can say you're not going to change anything, but some things do need to change. Not all change is bad."

If the proof is in the pudding, well last year was the biggest year for the store in decades. The clientele has broadened, got younger, and equally importantly the older customers still come. The place has history, but it's not beholden to nostalgia, it feels very much alive. “I think importantly we haven’t changed what the bookshop set out to do, which is to sell books about design and architecture. If anything we’ve gotten more pure and more hardcore in that mission.”

Part of the shift has meant dismantling a certain self-limiting mystique. Too many people, Heywood thinks, walked past the words architectural books and assumed the shop wasn't for them. "It's like going to a museum and saying, 'I can't go in there, I'm not an artist.' If you're a curious human being who likes beauty, you'll like it here."

The store hosted twenty-six events last year — screenings in the Redwood Park, an architecture trivia night at a local bar — up from essentially nothing in recent memory. There is also a 1970 VW transporter, converted into a bookmobile and deployed around the city to spread the word.

Moving through the stacks, Erik pulls out a copy of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ed Ruscha's famous leporello pamphlet. The copy in his hands is the very first edition. “He hand-glued all of this in his garage. The way you know the true first edition is that he hadn't quite sorted out the length — the first one has an extra two inches. The second one ends perfectly." A few shelves along, he produces a book with a cover made of loose, rearrangeable pieces tucked behind a translucent sleeve, that was made for the landmark exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape at MoMA in New York, and designed by the legendary Emilio Ambasz.

"It's like going to a museum and saying, 'I can't go in there, I'm not an artist.' If you're a curious human being who likes beauty, you'll like it here."

“They wanted a non-static cover, one people would change. It was much more translucent when it was new." He pauses, turning it over. "Someone's been smoking near it for a couple of decades."

The shop has also just taken possession of some three thousand volumes from the library of Roger Conover, executive editor of MIT Press's architecture and design list for forty years — being processed gradually from a nearby warehouse. It is, Erik suggests, rather extraordinary.

But the most consequential change at Stout is the institutional transformation happening around it. The Eames Institute recently acquired Zürich-based Lars Müller Publishers, the renowned Swiss imprint whose catalogue spans design, architecture, and art. Heywood is excited to bring publishing back to Stout, a dimension of the original operation that had lapsed, and signals how seriously the Institute is building out a full cultural ecosystem.

The highlight of this is a new space they're working on in Marin County, just off Highway 101, which used to belong to Birkenstock. The space was designed in the 1960s, a slice of Mid Century Futurism, but has been empty since 2020. Eames are planning to turn the space into an art and design museum, working with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to build out the space.

“The Eames’s were the only designers who figured out how to mass produce and keep the poetry. That's the first thing to go, and it's the hardest thing to keep."

The day after our visit to Stout, Erik takes us out for a private tour of the Eames Institute, which resembles the vault at the end of Raiders of the Last Ark, except furnished with row after row of chairs. But the archive is also overflowing with the couple’s ephemera, their drawings, love letters, little moments of inspirations.

Back on Montgomery Street, Erik describes a recent conversation he had with Benjamin Paulin — son of the late French designer Pierre — who told him his father had considered the Eameses the only designers he truly respected. “They were the only designers who figured out how to mass produce and keep the poetry. That's the first thing to go, and it's the hardest thing to keep."

Erik’s involved in something similar really, how to grow Stout without losing the charm that runs through its shelves. He tells a story by way of example: when the Eames Office was sent a Budweiser can in the 1960s, an account, he notes, that any firm would have killed for — they spent months exploring the brief. Then they sent the can back with a message that it does everything it needs to do already, and they turned the job down. "That integrity is so important," Erik says. And you can feel it as the motivating impetus still behind everything Stout does.