A La Jolla time capsule of academic gems, art archives and historic visitors that keeps up with the new and notable, this bookstore is worth checking out.
Step into DG Wills Books on Girard Avenue in The Village and you may wonder that you’ve stepped back in time, greeted by shelves and shelves of older books dappled with old typewriters, analog televisions and historical curios and lined up under Polaroids showing 46 years of special visitors.
But among the reliquaries and nostalgia are the latest bestsellers and just-discovered, hard-to-find editions a book lover craves, and somewhere amid all of it is owner Dennis Wills, bridging the jump from old-fashioned to right-on-time.
“We’ve got a lot of wonderful memories,” Wills said. “A lot of people from all around the world, lots of friendships.”
Equal parts collegiate and collegial, DG Wills Books is a vast, curated collection of new, used and antiquarian titles. Books are donated after Wills takes a call on his spiral-corded, push button phone, discovered by Wills as he’s out and about or purchased online by Wills at his computer.
The result is off the book, a comprehensive catalog that calls to readers from near and far.
The books offered often have an academic bend: “We’re strong in the sciences, including oceanography and marine biology, because of Scripps Institution of Oceanography,” Wills said.
This is on purpose; Wills chose La Jolla for his bookstore as he wanted to be near the Salk Institute and UC San Diego, he said, “on the premise that the libraries of professors would eventually come our way.”
And “indeed, they have,” he said, adding he recently required the library of neuroscientist Roger Guillemin, a La Jolla resident who died in 2024.
Wills also wanted to be near the academic community; his original patrons when he opened his store in 1979 (first on La Jolla Boulevard just north of Pearl Street) were students and professors.
Members of academia still comprise a large portion of the bookstore’s customers even as the Wills community has broadened to include book lovers of all types who peruse the shelves as classical music plays.
And “because San Diego is a theater town, we have the largest collection of plays and books on theater in Southern California,” Wills said.
In 1991, DG Wills books moved to its current location on Girard.
“My carpenter friends and I built the redwood ceiling and spruce floor,” Wills said. “I modeled the store after Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford, [England], where I lived for a year. I rode my bicycle to Blackwell’s every day of the week.”
DG Wills is also reminiscent of those stores on lower Fourth Avenue in New York in the 1970s, he said, shops he frequented as a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs after returning from intelligence service on the Czech-East German border.
The door chimes often with visitors at DG Wills, either customers or browsers happy for a peek behind the tiled frontage and beyond the desk or guest speakers like Francoise Gilot, Quincy Troupe, Gore Vidal and more.
So head into DG Wills Books for your next set of inspiring words, whether in a book or in conversation with Wills himself, who said he has “had a ball since 1979.”
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