BIRD & BECKETT BOOKS & RECORDS
We're working on updating this page. It's a little out of date!
Voted "Best Store Staff" by the Bay Guardian "Best of the Bay" readers poll for 2018, we're justly proud of our wonderful staff and welcome the acclaim! Check out that award here!
Short bios of the staff of our retail bookshop (Bird & Beckett Books & Records, or "B&B") and our allied nonprofit performing arts entity (Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project, or "BBCLP") are presented below:
Angela Bennett, BBCLP Publicity, Booking, Documentation & Operations, Staff Jack of All Trades Emeritus
Our erstwhile sound guy, Angie, perhaps known best as an innovator in the use of the disco lamp in jazz and the allied arts, brought years of experience in the local music scene to Bird & Beckett, and that was about 25 years ago. Now a virtuoso ukulelist, you may have seen her performing around town over the years with the Bad Mommies and its successor bands (Much More Fun, for one), or marching with the Ukulele Resistance Brigade when duty calls. For six years, 2010-2015, she was also the music booker for the best little street fair in town, our own (also erstwhile) Glen Park Festival. Although Angie has been involved in the store in varying capacities since first discovering B&B's live jazz in the fall of 2002 (she developed and still maintains our facebook page), she was brought onboard in a more official capacity in 2014 to handle the BBCLP's publicity, to add depth and breadth to our music bookings, to develop our Saturday night "jazz club!" programming, and to aid in the BBCLP's documentation and archiving functions. A skilled photographer, Angie shot the pictures you see in the slide show that pops up on this website. Although she has stepped away from the soundboard and other day-to-day roles, she's still on the BBCLP Board of Directors, and keeps watch from slightly further afield.
Michael Koch, B&B Operations, Buyer, BBCLP Poetry Series Booker & M.C.
Michael is a poet, visual artist, amateur percussionist and grandfather who lives in the Mission with an imaginary dog.
Ester Tuva, Assistant Manager
Ester is Bird & Beckett’s newest staff member, and she loves it here! She’s lucky to have another fun job as a woodworker’s assistant.
When not at the bookstore or the wood shop, she likes to read, paint, weave on her loom, and run around outside. She gets to Bird & Beckett on the trusty Bart from Oakland, where she lives with her wonderful girlfriend Gaby and three very real animals: Danny DogVito and cats Babette and Clover.
Lily Bennett, Nascent Jack of All Trades
Lily can do it all, or will soon! They're just getting started! Lily is our newest and youngest staff member, although they've been around the store their entire life. Lily's a champion cable-coiler and shelf-straightener, and when not at the store can be found studying theatre tech at Lowell or drawing dragons at home.
Lily's bio above was written a half-dozen years ago, and will be updated in a minute. As we revise and update the store website, we'll be adding Michael and Lily's current companions on the Bird & Beckett staff -- Ester, Nick, Anadelia, Ruby and Nana. So, check back soon or just stop in and chat with them during the store day.
Jerry Ferraz, BBCLP Poetry Series Host
Native son Jerry Ferraz was born into a musical family. A musician and poet of the troubadour persuasion, he has wandered the streets and bus routes of San Francisco guitar in hand ever since his childhood. He knows San Francisco like the back of his hand and is familiar, or used to be, with every nightclub and honky tonk where music has served the delight of culture-hungry locals. Lyrical and profound, his music and writing have always addressed the most immediate realities confronting human complexity, and always from the heart. He's performed at art shows, cabarets and poetry venues all over the city. Presently partnered with Michael Koch as impresaria of the poetry scene at bookshop, he's also an artist and aficionado of philosophic dispositions, and at heart a real Buddhist (not a "resume Buddhist"). The late poet Ronald Sauer, the author of this all too brief, slightly amended bio of Mr. Ferraz, noted that he always derived great pleasure by simply being with Jerry in his car driving from one corner of the city to another, as he seems to know every charming street and by-way normally remote to those driven to get where they're going with blind determination. Humor and grace with eyes wide open, says Ron, is the heart of Jerry's methodology.
Gabrielle Got, Book Lover
Gabby is on hiatus, having completed her freshman year of college. She's now working for the Park Service at the Golden Gate Bridge and attending CCSF, formulating plans to continue her study in environmental sciences and English literature in the future, hopefully in a French-speaking country. When not sporting the GGNRA uniform, she spends her free time working on crafts, reading fiction and fantasy, writing, listening to music, trying out instruments, and enjoying nature.
Jenna Littlejohn, Erstwhile B&B Asst. Mgr./Operations; still active as BBCLP Grants Advisor/Writer
Jenna started as the shop's assistant manager and grant writer for the nonprofit. Once the resident young person around here, our handy-dandy-millennial, she maintains that spark, but with seasoning. She's wise as hell, and you'd do well to get her book recommendation and her slant on politics and life in the current age of disorder.
Adanari Allatore Gonzalez, All Around Bookstore Person
Adanari, or Nana as everyone calls her, is a clerk, a questionable (sez she) historian, poet, reader and enthusiastic enjoyer of conversation. She loves the store and enjoys sitting in the tiny chairs in the back on Sundays to listen to the happy hour jams! She's off to Chicago for her first year of college, but we'll no doubt see her on the holidays.
Sherman
Sherman was a cat. Well, he was obviously more than a cat, but he's still just a cat. He keeps his own counsel. He was found in Tujunga, California on a New Year's Day in the arms of a panicked mother/daughter duo who didn't know what to do with the critter they'd just come upon. After alternately charming and terrorizing a screenwriter in Nichols Canyon above Hollywood, he was driven up to enjoy the calming influence of San Francisco's Glen Park, and installed as Bird & Beckett's majordomo and bookstore cat, where he's been mean to the neighborhood's dogs and threatening to its children and other unsuspecting humans ever since. Probably more so now that they just think they see him. But really, he's a pussycat! Wherever he is, he's still just a pussycat.
Eric Whittington, Proprietor
Eric took on and reconfigured an existing Glen Park bookshop back in May of 1999 to create Bird & Beckett Books & Records -- he's grateful for the wonderful bookshelves and computer system he inherited and proud of the store he's put together with the help of a lot of great staff along the way: Blanche Bebb, Justin Desmangles, Nicholas James Whittington, Steve Choisser, Jackson Whittington and several others. He's grateful to Manhal Jweinat for housing the store until 2008, and to the Tietz family for maintaining him now in the space that the family built to house the neighborhood's public library for 30 years. He thinks his current staff is peachy and figures he's got it pretty good now.
He got his first bookstore job in the summer of 1975 after his freshman year at UC Berkeley, shipping UC Extension correspondence course books for Ed Hunolt's Berkeley Book; dropped out after his sophomore year and found work at Green Apple on Clement, when it was small, from 1976-1977; and helped almost launch a massive used bookstore that would have been called the Bookdome on Westwood Blvd (it closed before it opened) in LA in 1978. Then, he returned to San Francisco and commuted to finish a BA in Film Studies at UCB.
Bird & Beckett owes everything first of all to Eric's family and friends, and then to his experience in those bookshop jobs and as a customer in his late teens and 20s at Moe's, Cody's and Shakespeare & Co. in Berkeley, City Lights and a whole passel of wonderful used bookshops in San Francisco, etc. He also credits a great, formative stint as operations manager with the San Francisco International Film Festival for a couple of seasons at the beginning of the 1980s; co-founding a music promotion partnership in SF called Carnaval that taught him what he knows about booking and presenting live music; toiling for half a dozen years co-writing and co-producing an (ultimately unmade) indie teens-in-trouble feature film that lives only in memory, a jumble of file boxes and this promo trailer; and then helping spin out of that a little record company which lasted for a handful of vinyl and cassette releases that he's still proud of... His employers and partners in all of these episodes deserve thanks and acclaim. Until he paid off his credit card debt just a couple of years ago, he paid his personal bills as a typist (read: word processor/editor) from the time his second son was born in 1983. He's free of that work at last, and able to just operate, with lots of help, the work of running the bookshop and the nonprofit. The two operations and now, at age 70, Social Security sustain him. All hail the nanny state that invented SSI, and the individuals who appreciate Bird & Beckett sufficiently to patronize and support it!
Eric has three adult children who are truly amazing, and a couple grandkids that look on course to put his kids to shame. Other than living in America in this ugly era, he's pretty pleased with and proud of his personal state of things, and grateful to the shop's loyal & growing base of patrons.