I arrived at Green Apple Books as they were opening for the day. Staff were rolling carts of sale books onto Clement Street, those irresistible sidewalk stacks I had to convince myself to ignore.
Inside, the store feels a little like an oversized San Francisco apartment that somehow kept expanding over the years. The floors change beneath your feet. Hallways narrow and widen. Odd-sized stairs appear and disappear. The layout twists and turns in multiple dimensions, unified only by the bookshelves and, perched high on top, a dizzying array of art and strange artifacts. There’s a sense that if you turned away for a moment, something might shift.
Pete Mulvihill, one of the store’s owners, led me through the maze. We settled into a pair of chairs upstairs in the philosophy section, appropriately under reconstruction. Green Apple is, at its core, the result of steady adaptation.
The original owner opened the shop while working for United Airlines, running it only on weekends at first. “This used to be an apartment,” Pete told me. “He just gutted it and put in bookshelves. Cut a hole in the wall.” Over time, the store expanded into neighboring spaces, something that would be far harder to do today.
From the beginning, the philosophy was to respond to readers. “Sell more of what’s selling,” Pete said, recalling the founder’s advice.
But that instinct has always been in tension with something else: curation.
“Bad books hide good books,” he said.
Green Apple is legendary among hardcore readers for its collection. Every time I visit, the shelves overflow with titles from my to-read list, and even the briefest of browsing yields new gems. Featured sections like Customer Favorites, the Green Apple Hall of Fame, and 50 Years of Green Apple show the glory of not just their lineage but the taste of the curators.
That’s the point. If you have to sift through noise to find something worthwhile, the whole experience breaks down.
That balance between responsiveness and discernment is shaped as much by economics as by taste.
Books have fixed prices. Margins are thin. Rent and labor costs in San Francisco are a constant challenge. “If publishers gave us five percent more,” Pete said, “there’d be twice as many bookstores.” And Amazon, of course, is always there, training customers to expect speed and discounts that independent stores simply can’t match.
So survival comes down to all the other decisions.
Used books help, though they require more labor, each one bought, evaluated, and priced by hand. Staff curate deeply, sometimes sourcing titles from overseas or working directly with tiny publishers. “We’ll go out of our way for something special,” Pete said. “Even if I have to put it on a credit card.”
The store also thinks beyond the transaction. Pete helped found San Francisco’s “Local First” initiative, built around a simple idea: shopping locally keeps money circulating locally. Studies showed that roughly 62% of a bookstore purchase stays in the community—compared to effectively none with Amazon. Green Apple has leaned into that ethos, supporting neighborhood events, street improvements, and the kind of independent commercial fabric that Clement Street still manages to sustain.
And then there are the thousand small experiments.
Some are subtle, such as shifting shelf space, refining sections, adjusting inventory. Others are more direct. Pete described one recent success: “a staff member suggested ‘dad-style’ baseball caps, and they sold so quickly that we ended up ordering 1,000. It’s fun spotting them out in the world.”
Events are another piece of the equation. While the Clement Street store hosts smaller readings, much of Green Apple’s programming now happens at its second location across Golden Gate Park, a space designed to hold larger crowds. For even bigger events, they’ll even go offsite. As a result, the store can host everything from intimate conversations to major literary events such as a feature with Ocean Vuong. Sometimes things get weirder. Pete told me about one appearance by Dave Eggers, who once offered relationship advice from a booth. On another occasion, he gave haircuts to a couple of brave volunteers.
“That big event pays for the little poetry reading where two people buy a book,” Pete said.
It’s all part of the same system: a store constantly adjusting, constantly redistributing energy from one part of the business to another.
“It’s the opposite of death by a thousand cuts,” Pete said. “It’s a thousand little improvements.”
It’s the perfect description. Not just of how Green Apple survives, but of how it feels to walk through it.
Scott Lambridis is a novelist based in Bellingham, Washington. A former indie press founder, performance series organizer, olive farmer, and progressive rocker, he studied neurobiology at the University of Virginia, earned an MFA from San Francisco State University, and read a book from every country in the world. His debut novel, St. Ulphia’s Dead, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing on July 7, 2026. Learn more at scottlambridis.com
