Killer Ideas

The portly little man with the big eyeglasses didn’t really want to talk. He didn’t really want to say his name. He had a soft voice and a nervous laugh, and seemed uneasy about the opened copy of “The Anarchist Cookbook” in his hands.

His real interest, he finally said, wasn’t in the book, with its designs for booby traps and recipes for Molotov cocktails, but in surveillance.

He had this friend, see, a private investigator, who “just wanted me to find out a few things.” So the man had come to Survival Books on Magnolia Boulevard in North Hollywood to “just kinda educate myself about things you don’t learn in school. The kind of information you find here you can’t find in other places.”

Behind its security grate, the dimly lighted store traffics in information that dances on the edges of the 1st Amendment--the kind that feeds people’s fantasies of confounding who or whatever is menacing them, or of nimbly escaping the whole mess, or, should push come to shove, taking matters into their own lethal hands.

With Pegboard walls and posters of Stallone, Schwarzenegger and other movie mayhem-makers taped to the ceiling, Survival Books is a minimarket of defiant knowingness. Here a person can buy reading material on how to spy on others, how to get false identification, how to pick locks, how to knife-fight, how to be an effective sniper, how to convert semiautomatic weapons into illegal fully automatic ones.

Survival Books proprietor Nancy Litwack, a candid woman of 55 who has lived in North Hollywood her entire life, doubts that her wares have led customers to any seriously reprehensible behavior.

“Some people just like to read things they’ve never read before,” she shrugs. “I don’t have the gangs in here. I’m serving people who feel their right to read what they want is important. So far, it’s not against the law to read about this stuff.”

She cites the example of the book “The Joy of Killing”--she just sold her last copy to a young woman. “We have a lot of writers come in,” she said, “and, you know, why tax your mind to come up with things when you can read about them and then add them to your script with your own spin on them? The people who are actually out there doing it aren’t reading the step-by-step of how to do it.”

Litwack said she only presumes that “The Joy of Killing” elucidates various means of ringing down the curtain on people’s lives. “Who knows? I’ve never opened it. Hey, I don’t read any of this information. I just pay the bills.”

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Survival Books doesn’t concern itself only with lethality, however. Litwack started the business 23 years ago as an outlet for preserved foods that could be stored long-term against the prospect of natural disasters. The store’s inventory grew and diversified in response to customers’ broadening sense of jeopardy, she said.

Today at Survival Books, “survival” is a liberally construed concept arrayed against the whole smorgasbord of menace a baleful world throws at the human psyche.

On its shelves is instruction in dealing with overbearing government (“How to Start Your Own Country”), overwhelming debt (“Credit: Beating the System”), stressed marriages (“How to Dump Your Wife”) and the prospect of spending yet another Saturday night alone and unloved (“The Bartender’s Guide to Picking Up Women”).

People’s money problems especially have stoked the survival business, creating a demand for intelligence on beating bill collectors and putting one’s assets into offshore banks.

“Twenty years ago, I stocked one book on credit,” Litwack said. “Now I bet I could have a good 30 to 50 titles on credit because people are just not handling their life well. Some customers come in very well-dressed and looking well-to-do, but they’re just so out on the limb with money worries. These banks and credit cards are just drowning people.”

As concern with money problems has grown, so has interest in assuming new identities. Survival Books carries publications with such titles as “Counterfeit ID Made Easy” and “How to Create a New Identity.” For those yearning to quit this land of sorrows, there is “Reborn Overseas.” For those hungering to stay in this land of opportunity, there is “Reborn in the United States: The Complete Guide to Obtaining a U.S. Identity.”

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Although much of her inventory--catalogs of Nazi military decorations, a manual on how to destroy bridges--might be readily associated with the feral far right, Litwack denies any radical leanings on her part. After all, she also stocks “Earthquake Safety Activities for Children,” “Marijuana Hydroponics” and “Raising the Home Duck Flock.”

“Oh, I have my own political views, but I’m really right down the middle,” she said. “My husband happens to be Jewish by faith. I am not. I have the KKK in here. I have the JDL. I have a lot of different groups, and I don’t side with any of them.”

One group she definitely sides against, however, is people who would beat her out of her profits. She accepts no personal checks and gets telephone confirmation of all credit-card purchases.

The policy is the result of a lesson in business survival she learned some time ago, she said. “I went through a period when some customers read some of my books and then tried some of the tricks on me.”