During the Vietnam protests, Telegraph and the entire Southside area of Berkeley became the flashpoint for numerous run-ins with the police and national guard. When curfews were called by the authorities, Moe would refuse to close his doors, saying people were free to walk on the streets. An occasional tear gas cannister would roll down the street and many protesters took refuge in the store.
In the course of the store's existence, two other stores got their start within Moe's itself. First was the poster shop run by Don and Alice Schenker that they called the Print Mint. The business is still on the Avenue, now called the Reprint Mint. The second was a small Eastern Philosophy shop called Shambhala. The shop stayed on the Avenue until it finally closed in late 2003, but the other offshoot of the business, Shambhala Publishing, still thrives today. In the mid-seventies when Moe's decided to stop selling records, two employees bought out the inventory and started Berrigan and Brown in Oakland. At the end of that decade, a number of employees split off and created Black Oak Books in North Berkeley.
Moe began a revolution that altered the landscape of the used book business: he assigned values to paperbacks and softcover books. A sign was nailed to the wall above the buying counter so people would know what they would get. Before this, used bookstores would literally buy by the pound, giving little or no value for the books they took. Many stores still work by this method, but smart customers selling their books still start at Moe's when making their rounds.
Moe's was one of the early on-line bookstores, with the art store having a virtual presence since 1993 on the web. It's only been the past few years that the main store has started listing titles on-line.Over the years, Moe's didn't just sell books, the people who worked here sometimes wrote them. The most notable ex-staffer is Jonathan Lethem, who wrote and sold his first novel, "Gun With Occasional Music," while working at the store. Joseph Fischer, who left academia thirty years ago to schlep books at Moe's, has written a number of books about Indonesian art and textiles, the most recent, "The Story Cloths of Bali," was published by 10 Speed Press in 2004, when he retired. Current employee Owen Hill is a well known local poet and author of "The Chandler Apartments," his well-received mystery novel.
The store is in the same building that was built for it almost 30 years ago. Its 4 floors hold over one hundred thousand books of all subjects, including sheet music.Just four blocks from the campus, many scholarly and academic titles are bought at the front counter every day.
