Rare Books and De Luxe Editions

"A. G. Geiger's place was a store frontage on the north side of the boulevards near Las Palmas. The entrance door was set far back in the middle and there was a copper trim on the windows, which were backed with Chinese screens, so I couldn't see into the store. There was a lot of oriental junk in the windows. I didn't know whether it was any good, not being a collector of antiques, except unpaid bills." (22)

Geiger's pornography syndicate, which poses as a storefront for rare and exotic books, will come to symbolize the facades created by the morally ambiguous. As embodied by the sense of false history perpetuated by the ornateness of the Sternwood mansion, and the cover up of the oil fields that are turned into public parks, Los Angeles can be seen as the victim of its own self-mythologizing.

The picture of Bennett's Bookshop was taken from "Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles" by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward.