With a roll-up garage door entrance wide enough to fit a fleet of cars, Equator Books is a breath of fresh air from dimly lit antiquarian outposts.

Owners Philip Fracassi and Michael Deyermond handpick every out-of-print, first edition and rare book in the store. The result: Inventory as varied as back issues of Progressive Architecture magazine mixed with a 1970s autobiography of a call girl. The store is organized by the categories of literature, poetry, art and architecture, with offbeat specialty topics in the mix like drugs and crime, circus freaks and bullfighting. We appreciated the obsessive thoroughness and unique charm of the buyers' choices; the must-see surf section had vintage surf photography books sharing shelf space with a 1980s teen-fiction novel, The Surfer and the City Girl, and old Surfer magazines. Literary geeks gawk at the unassuming glass case in the back, where a first edition of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye fetches a price tag of $15,000 and a first edition of On the Road by Jack Kerouac rings in at $5,000. The addition of a vinyl store brought gems from the personal collection of Grover Lewis, a journalist for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s. But even before that, music was in the history of the store space. Before Equator Books moved into the garage that housed Mercedes cars in the 1970s, it was an arts commune and then a private studio for Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction fame. —Rhea Cortado