Stanley Rose

Stanley Rose (December 5, 1899 – October 17, 1954) was an American bookseller, literary agent and raconteur whose eponymous Hollywood bookshop, located (from 1935 until its closure in 1939) adjacent to the famous Musso & Frank Grill restaurant, was a gathering place for writers working or living in and around Hollywood. Rose’s most notable literary associates were William Saroyan, to whom he was variously a friend, a drinking and hunting companion, and a literary representative; and Nathanael West, whose 1939 novel The Day of the Locust owed much of its “local color” to its author’s acquaintance with Rose.

Stanley Rose was born in Matador, Texas. He served in the United States Army during World War I, and was said to have received an injury to his throat that necessitated treatment at a veterans’ hospital in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University—from which, according to historian Kevin Starr, Rose “absorbed the atmosphere of books as if by osmosis.” By the mid-1920s he had moved to Los Angeles and entered the book trade, most successfully as an itinerant supplier of books to writers and executives at the Hollywood studios; according to at least one account, he also operated as a bootlegger, smuggling his liquor deliveries into the studios in the false bottoms of the suitcases he used to make his book deliveries. (Many accounts also claim that he sold erotic or pornographic literature as well.) By the late 1920s, he had become a partner in the Satyr Book Shop, which had opened in 1926 on Hudson Street and subsequently moved to a prime location on Vine Street near the Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant. The Satyr partnership dissolved after Rose took the rap for his partners by pleading guilty to a violation of the Copyright Act related to their publication of a pirated edition of a popular risqué humor book of the day, The Specialist by Charles (Chic) Sale. After serving a short jail sentence, Rose opened his own bookshop, on the opposite side of Vine Street from the Satyr.

Rose operated his bookshop on Vine Street and at one other location (on Selma Avenue) for about four years prior to moving, in January 1935, to what would become its final and most memorable site, at 6661½ Hollywood Boulevard, a few doors east of the Musso & Frank Grill restaurant. Even before this time the shop had begun to attract many screenwriters and novelists, who came seeking not just books but also the congenial company of their fellows and of Rose himself, but the move to the Hollywood Boulevard location helped to solidify its status as a kind of unofficial “clubhouse” for writers. California historian Kevin Starr has written: “The bookshop and the bar [at Musso & Frank] operated together with superb synergy, creating a welcomed sense of community for screenwriters suffering from an understandable sense of displacement.” (Less often mentioned, but also important, was the fact that the Screen Writers' Guild was located directly across the Boulevard.)

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