Opamp Technical Bookstore
Opamp Technical Bookstore, located on N Sycamore Ave in Los Angeles, California,[1][2], was one of the largest brick-and-mortar retail bookstores of a bygone pre-Internet era. It was founded in April 1977 by Lyn Luzwick and went out of business on February 28, 2014[3]. For 35 years, this bookstore was the Mecca of human technical knowledge. It was claimed to be one of the largest stores of its kind in the United States in the 1990s.
Many electrical engineers loved visiting this place, spending hours roaming its aisles, comparing books, whetting their curiosity on a subject, and figuring out how much they could afford to buy. A German Shepherd named Holly sat quietly under the table of the owner as the unofficial mascot of the bookstore. People were often surprised when they discovered it, since it was located in an unassuming, non-commercial neighborhood, far away from any mall or shopping center. There wasn’t a technical book an engineer or scientist couldn’t find there. And if by some chance the book wasn’t in stock, the staff could get it within a week—or faster if one was willing to pay. Visitors couldn’t resist falling in love with the place. Those who loved books found it hard to leave without purchasing one[4]
At its peak in 1995, the bookstore had approximately 50,000 books in stock. In addition, they had access to millions of titles, according to Ron Spyrison, Opamp’s former marketing manager. They received nearly 1,000 calls for books every day and packaged and shipped orders all over the United States. It functioned not only as a brick-and-mortar bookstore but also as a mail-order and phone-order business: staffers helped walk-in customers, answered phone calls nationwide, looked up rare or hard-to-find titles, retrieved them from shelves or ordered them, and packaged and mailed them—sometimes overnight.[4]
Opamp was the literary mecca for computer jocks, software developers, scientists, professors, engineers, builders, designers, and technicians—indeed, anyone who needed a formula, a principle, a theorem, a handbook, a construction code, or a computer manual. The bookstore carried books on subjects ranging from relativity to refrigeration, from the arcana of applied mathematics to the practicalities of programming, from fractals to film editing, and from soil mechanics to statistics.[4]
The store also bought used books. The owner or one of their 30 employees would quickly review a used book presented for sale and then propose a price to buy it immediately for cash.[4]
References
- ↑ "OPAMP TECHNICAL BOOKSTORE". Yelp.com. 11/30/2025. Archived from the original on
|archive-url=requires|archive-date=(help). Retrieved 11/25/2025. Unknown parameter|url-status=ignored (help); Check date values in:|access-date=, |date=(help) - ↑ caskey (09/10/2016). "Bookstores". Reddit.com. Archived from the original on
|archive-url=requires|archive-date=(help). Retrieved 11/25/2025. Unknown parameter|url-status=ignored (help); Check date values in:|access-date=, |date=(help) - ↑ Luzwick, Lynn (11/25/2025). "Lynn Luzwick | LinkedIn". LinkedIn.com. Retrieved 11/25/2025. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help); Check date values in:|access-date=, |date=(help) - ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Karon, Paul (1995-03-08). "The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Mecca of Much Human Technical Knowledge : Bookstore: Opamp in Hollywood has access to millions of titles from fractals to splines". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2025-12-01.
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