On a recent Friday afternoon at Underdog Bookstore in Monrovia, Kealie Mardell-Carrera paused midconversation as a woman entered the store.

“How are you doing?” Mardell-Carrera asked the new arrival, who described a long day of cleaning up ash from the Eaton fire at her mother’s house.

After checking in, Mardell-Carrera got down to business — but she wasn’t selling books.

“You’re picking up for the Girl Scouts, right? OK, we have everything ready for you. It’s gonna be these two bags full of clothing, and then these two white bags have some toys and stationery supplies,” said Mardell-Carrera as she hoisted up sacks of donated items from under the store’s small front desk and helped haul them out to a waiting car.

In the wake of the Eaton fire, Underdog Bookstore, which had supplies stacked on tables and shelves around the shop, began acting as a distribution center for those impacted by the blaze. The store also used its social media accounts to provide information and updates to the public.

“As soon as we could after the fires, as soon as we had power and were able to reopen again, we started accepting donations and becoming a donation distribution location. So we have been providing food, clothing, health and hygiene supplies — pretty much anything that we could think of for those in need,” says Mardell-Carrera.

“We just wanted to take the opportunity to do what we can to support our community, as so many people are hurting and in need right now, and community has always been at the heart of Underdog,” she says.

“We were just ready to do whatever we could to help.”

Bookstores banding together

Underdog isn’t the only Southern California bookstore in this effort. Octavia’s Bookshelf, Black Cat Fables, DYM, Vroman’s, Chevalier’s, Diesel, Skylight and others have launched efforts ranging from completely transforming into distribution hubs to sponsoring book drives and more.

Allison K. Hill, the American Booksellers Association’s CEO, sees this positive response to adversity as one of the strengths of independent bookstores.

“From Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena offering local evacuees access to electricity and internet to Southern California indie booksellers contributing money to GoFundMe campaigns for L.A. booksellers who lost their homes or donating books to schools that lost their libraries, it’s no surprise that local independent bookstores have come together to support each other and their communities during these fires,” said Hill, the former president and CEO of Vroman’s and Book Soup (and onetime columnist for this newspaper) via email. “Independent bookstores are all about community.”

So on the afternoon of Jan. 24, booksellers at four stores in the San Gabriel Valley — Octavia’s, Black Cat, DYM and Underdog — discussed their efforts and answered questions about why bookshops so often jumped into action.

“There definitely has been that trend in the bookseller community of everyone pivoting to do what they can to help, and I think it comes from that bookstores have always been about being community spaces,” said Mardell-Carrera, comparing them to another bedrock community hub — libraries. “We are all just here for each other and ready to support, and it’s been wonderful to see that across all the local bookstores.

“They’re never just a place where you go to buy books,” said Mardell-Carrera.

Octavia’s Bookshelf

In Pasadena later that afternoon, Octavia’s owner Nikki High sat at her desk answering questions over the phone as a takeout container sat untouched.

High, whose home survived the Eaton fire but won’t be habitable for some time, said she’d seen how bookstores had responded after the disaster.

“Yes, I have noticed that absolutely. Bookstores were the first to reach out to me, the ones outside of our area, to check in. They are running fundraisers from here to Washington, D.C.,” she said.

“I think it’s because indie bookstores serve as not just a literary hub but a community center. We interface with so many folks from our community. We ourselves belong to the community, and I think that’s why you see bookstores doing the work every day.”

Almost immediately after the fire swept through Altadena and Pasadena, High transformed her store into a community center, pulling out the books and bringing in supplies of water, clothing, food, toiletries and more, as well as making deliveries to those in need.

“We have food; food donations are coming in. We will be here for as long as we can,” High had told me Jan. 9. “This is your community mutual-aid hub. If we don’t have what you need, we will try to find it for you.”

High was grateful to be able to help those in need. “It was,” she says, “an honor.

“I could not have done it without the help of my community,” she said. “I’m so grateful that so many people are good and that they reached out to help me continue to do this for as long as I did, and I just can’t think of anywhere else I would rather be under these circumstances, I want to be in the trenches with my community. It feels very full circle to be able to support the same people who have been supporting me for the last two years.”

While property loss is often the measuring stick for a disaster, High said she hoped everyone would remember the people affected.

“With the reports of the number of structures that were lost in Altadena, remember that beyond the structures were families and businesses and people,” she said. “That needs to be accounted for.”

Black Cat Fables

Outside the Monrovia shop Jan. 24, tables overflowed with books that were free and available to anyone who’d been impacted by the fire.

Veronica Bane, a high school English teacher and young adult fiction author, teamed with the store, which was launched by former Altadena Library staffers, to sponsor the book drive and giveaway.

“When everything was happening with the fires, I saw that everyone was jumping in to help with basic needs, necessities, hygiene, and I also saw that the community was just rising to support immediately, and I loved that,” said Bane. “I know my community, both of teachers and authors, would jump in to make this happen,” she said. “As a teacher, my classroom library is filled with donations from authors and things like that, and I knew how devastated I would be if I lost it, so I said, OK, I can tap that community, and I know they will show up. And oh, boy, have they.”

Inside, store owner Nicole Fabry said serving the community and supporting local authors and businesses informed everything they do.

“(Assistant manager])Mikayla and I both come from the Altadena Library. That’s where we used to work, so I think that’s kind of just been ingrained in us. We just really wanted to be of service,” said Fabry. “So when the opportunity came up to do something for the community we didn’t hesitate. We were more than happy to do it, and it will continue.”

As far as bookstores stepping up, Fabry said, “It’s just that community spirit and wanting to support in any way that they can.”

Back outside the store, Bane, slightly out of breath from jogging back and forth between the parking lot to take a call in the quiet of her car and running the book giveaway, said she was heartened by the response.

“I’m extremely grateful to everyone who has shown up. It’s been great to be able to offer people new and like-new books, because I think there’s an amount of dignity to being able to shop for new books. I did not want a single person coming here and feeling like they were getting someone’s discards. I wanted it to feel really like they were shopping.

“It’s been wonderful because we’ve been able to take some of the donations and buy books from this store. So I wanted to support the bookstores, the people in need, the schools, all of that. And that’s been just so magical. And I’m grateful that we’re able to do it.”

Bane, who has since done another giveaway with Diesel, a Bookstore, in Santa Monica that passed out more than 5,000 books, said the local bookstores were demonstrating the kind of role they already play in local neighborhoods.

“We are so lucky to have so many great bookstores in Los Angeles. I think in a lot of ways, we take it for granted just how incredible it is that you can kind of walk in any major part of the city, and there’s a great bookstore there. And they care. Their collections are curated for their specific neighborhood. They go above and beyond for authors.

“I mean, I’m not shocked at all that the bookstores have stepped up,” said Bane.

DYM Books and Boba

For several weeks after the fires, Pasadena’s Hen’s Teeth shopping center, where DYM Books and Boba is located, was transformed into a busy hub for donations of hygiene items, food, clothing and more essentials.

The large collaborative effort, which involved several businesses and charitable groups, got started when DYM co-owner Desiree Sayarath learned her son’s soccer team was looking to host a fundraiser and she offered up her space. And things grew from there.

“I think something about bookstores and book lovers and readers, there’s just the strong need to give and provide,” said Sayarath, who had only just opened the store Dec. 14 with her husband, Rigo Hernandez. “I think it just shows more how we understand that we need to be united, and how books often act as a bridge.

“People often say that reading makes you more empathetic, and I think reading just helps clear the way for that,” she said, noting that the drive brought the businesses together in the effort.

“The EZ Halal market next door helped us with our drive; Kings Breakfast n Burger was providing food for first responders,” said Sayarath. “But I think there’s just something about being a reader and being in a place that is supposed to promote empathy and diversity and community that just makes a difference somehow.”

She returned to the basic idea of people helping people.

“It’s just as simple as putting out a call and seeing who will respond. I met so many strangers off the internet who just offered their services and came and dedicated their days here.

“The very first day of the drive, we had some volunteers from Redlands, I think, and they’d been literally just driving around Pasadena seeing who would take volunteers. And then they found us and spent six hours with us.

“It just blows my mind that they did that,” said Sayarath. “That’s amazing.”

What’s ahead

The recovery and rebuilding from the wildfires will be a long process, and booksellers are already looking ahead for ways they can help.

“I’ve been researching books that are specific to fires and loss for kids; I am looking forward to incorporating some trauma therapy alongside being a bookstore,” said High of Octavia’s Bookshelf. “There’s such acute stress right now; everyone is just sort of trying to survive.

“And so I’m working with lots of mental health professionals to have those sessions here in the bookstore, and I’m looking forward to doing that long term because there is such a long road ahead of us in terms of emotional and mental healing.”

Underdog’s Mardell-Carrera echoed this message.“We anticipate that people are going to need this for the foreseeable future. This isn’t like a short-term fix, and then everyone is going to be back on their feet. We’re prepared to have this be part of our work for the foreseeable future,” said Mardell-Carrera.

“It’s something that had already been in the works at Underdog, that we have a community fridge now, and that’s something that we had been planning since last November, so we were already working towards being able to do things like this,” she says. “It just happened very quickly and on a larger scale than we anticipated.

“But we will continue for as long as the community needs it. And the response is there from people bringing in donations that are needed and people coming to collect stuff. We want this to be a space where people feel they can do that. So I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon,” she said.