San Francisco Bizarro
St. Martin’s, 2000. An illustrated guidebook that’s really more of a tear through the last 50 years of San Francisco history. Chapters on sex, death, celebrities, sleazy bars, strange museums, and odd inventions. Plenty of photos, addresses, and contact information. Available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and fine bookstores everywhere.
Hunter Thompson: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” San Franciscans turn pro before they’re out of elementary school. Pez dispensers, Charlie Manson and mouse taxidermy: They’re all part of San Francisco’s endlessly weird back pages, and Jack Boulware knows exactly where to find them. The former SF Weekly columnist and feature writer follows up his first book (“Sex, American Style”) with, well, his second. Given Boulware’s nose for absurdity, “San Francisco Bizarro” is the thinking person’s guide to our curious little burg.—San Francisco Chronicle
Jack Boulware is a wry Virgil with a killer prose style, a literary provocateur who ushers you to more than 100 unforgettable sites with delightful history lessons along the way.—San Francisco magazine
A comprehensive guide to all the sites and scenes that make this city worth living in for a skewed sensibility such as Boulware’s. Whether a new transplant or a native, everything you need to really enjoy San Francisco is in this book.—SF Weekly
Wickedly witty. If you just want to ride a cable car, eat Ghirardelli chocolate and see Fisherman’s Wharf, this is not the book for you. This book is a tour of the wild side, the frisky and the risque.—Newsday
A wonderful guide to the porn palaces and leather bars aimed at the kind of tourists who visit SF once and never leave.—Playboy
A collection of weirdness, lunacy and freakery.—Time Out London
You’re going to need all the leather you can get your hands on for this, the city that brings you: taxidermied mice in an upscale hardware store; lodgings where B&B stands for bed and bondage; a Jewish-Irish sports bar; retail guitars made out of toilet seats.—Chicago Tribune
From inventions like fortune cookies, television, and Levis to California Anti-Cuisine, the Church of John Coltrane, the CIA’s LSD brothel, and the Blotter Acid Museum, it’s all here, all the stuff that makes the city by the Bay a great and quite odd place to live.—About.com
A must for even the most jaded Bay Area lifers.—Amazon.com reader
Jack Boulware’s tales of underground San Francisco are legendary. He boldly goes where those with strange fetishes go; he leaves no rock uncrawled beneath, and reports all with an unflinching, droll spin.—JT LeRoy aka Laura Albert, New York Press (Full interview here)