Kepler's Books and the 1960s

Kepler's Books sits just over the Palo Alto line in Menlo Park, but its story belongs to the whole Midpeninsula. For seven decades it has been a bookstore, a debating hall and, at times, a headquarters for causes. Its founder was a pacifist who spent the Second World War in work camps for conscientious objectors. Its back room helped raise a generation of activists and at least one rock band.

Our page on Palo Alto in the 1960s touches on Kepler's. This page tells the store's full story, from Roy Kepler's early life to the community rescue of 2005 and the store you can visit today.

Roy Kepler, conscientious objector

Roy C. Kepler was born on May 7, 1920, in Colorado. When the United States entered World War II, he refused military service on grounds of conscience. From June 3, 1942, to March 1, 1946, he served in six Civilian Public Service camps, the work camps run for conscientious objectors. His papers at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection describe him as a radical pacifist who organized inside the camps.

After the war he moved to the Bay Area. He worked for years with the War Resisters League, especially its West Coast branches. He was also part of the founding circle of the Pacifica Foundation and worked at KPFA, its listener-supported radio station in Berkeley. In 1950 he summed up his outlook this way: "Peace is not a 'thing', it is a way."

A paperback shop in 1955

Kepler opened his store in May 1955 on El Camino Real in Menlo Park, next to the Guild Theater. Palo Alto Online gives the date as May 14 and says he started with about $4,000 and secondhand fixtures. He later explained that he had always loved books and saw a viable business in them.

The timing mattered. In the early 1950s many booksellers and readers looked down on paperbacks. Kepler bet on them. Along with City Lights in San Francisco and Cody's in Berkeley, Kepler's became one of the Bay Area's paperback pioneers. Cheap editions of serious books put philosophy, politics and poetry within reach of students. Michael Doyle's 2012 book about Kepler carries the subtitle Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution.

A store with a cause

Kepler's first employee was Ira Sandperl, a fellow pacifist, civil rights advocate and student of Gandhian nonviolence. The two did not keep their politics behind the counter. According to Palo Alto Online, Sandperl helped Kepler start the Peninsula Committee for the Abolition of Nuclear Tests, later called Acts for Peace.

• 1960: Kepler was among protesters arrested at the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory over nuclear weapons, according to Metro Silicon Valley.
• 1965: Joan Baez and Sandperl proposed the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. Kepler helped establish it.
• 1960s: Kepler and Sandperl mentored young activists in the movement against the Vietnam War.
• Other groups: His papers list ties to the Peacemakers, the Committee for Nonviolent Action and the Third Camp.

Kepler also helped start the Midpeninsula Free University in 1966. He chaired its curriculum committee and taught a course on nonviolence, then distanced himself as the group changed. It was gone by the summer of 1971.

The back room in the 1960s

For young people on the Peninsula, Kepler's was the place to be. Barbara Meier described the daytime crowd as a "collection of poets, musicians, painters, writers, socialists and pacifists." Stanford students mixed with dropouts.

Jerry Garcia spent nearly every day in the back room in the early 1960s, according to the Palo Alto Historical Association. In 1960 he and Robert Hunter played there as a folk duo. Hunter recalled the store as "a place for young Stanfordites and the young ne'er-do-wells like us to meet." Phil Lesh met Garcia there in 1961. Our page on the Grateful Dead's Palo Alto roots follows that story. Many of the same people drifted between the store and the writers' cottages on Perry Lane.

Stewart Brand, a 1960 Stanford graduate who later created the Whole Earth Catalog, said it was "almost certain that half of the books that bent my young mind" came from Kepler's. Joan Baez was a regular customer and one of the store's best-known supporters.

Branches and moves

The business grew with the region. The Menlo Park store expanded to about 5,000 square feet by 1971, then to about 8,000 in a former auto body shop. Palo Alto Online traced these locations:

InMenlo gives the original address as 935 El Camino Real and the current one as 1010 El Camino Real.

Clark Kepler and a famous reading

In the early 1980s Roy Kepler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The store was quietly put up for sale in 1982 and 1983. His son Clark, who had been studying environmental ethics, decided to take it over instead. Kepler's own history dates Clark's management to 1980.

In 1989, after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, some bookstores pulled The Satanic Verses from their shelves. Kepler's held a public reading from the book by Ira Sandperl instead. Joan Baez performed at the event. In 1994 Publishers Weekly named Kepler's its Bookseller of the Year. Roy Kepler died on January 1, 1994.

The 2005 closing and the rescue

Chain bookstores, online shopping and rising local costs squeezed independent stores in the early 2000s. Kepler's celebrated its 50th anniversary in May 2005. Three months later, on August 31, 2005, it closed. The reaction was immediate. The community held protests and offered money and volunteer time. With community investors, a renegotiated lease and a new board, the store reopened that October.

In 2012 Clark Kepler and Praveen Madan of San Francisco's Booksmith led a volunteer transition team that rebuilt the business on a hybrid model. The bookstore became a community-financed social purpose corporation. A separate nonprofit, the Kepler's Literary Foundation, took on author events and programs. It won federal tax-exempt status in January 2018.

Kepler's today

Kepler's marked its 70th anniversary in 2025. In October 2021 it helped launch Reimagining Bookstores, a movement of independent stores focused on literacy, community and living wages. It set a $20 starting wage in June 2022. Its website says a new management team now leads the store.

Pair a visit with a walk down Santa Cruz Avenue, where the Warlocks played their first gigs in 1965.

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