What’s in a Name?: DIESEL, A Bookstore

This installment of Bookselling This Week’s new “What’s in a Name?” series looks at how Northern California’s DIESEL, A Bookstore, which has locations in Oakland, Larkspur, and Santa Monica, got its name.

In the late 1980s, John Evans and Alison Reid were laying the groundwork for an indie bookstore in Emeryville, California, a corrupt, postindustrial, Chandler-esque kind of town, said Evans, but one quickly pulling in artists to fill up its vacant lofts.

Evans and Reid wanted to create a bookstore that offered books to people of all walks of life and all types of interests, a store that provided an inviting space for the community to interact.

They also wanted to give the store a welcoming and accessible name but were sure of three things they did not want the name to be: a reference to flora or fauna, a literary allusion, or “John and Alison’s.”

“We wanted something urban and fun, and also something that would be okay for us to say every day when we answered the phone, because we wanted to do this for decades,” said Evans.

At the time, Evans and Reid were living in a cottage on Bonita Street in Berkeley and on more than one occasion, as they sat in the garden sipping coffee and talking over names, the woman next door would call out to her dog — a brown-and-white Pointer named Diesel.

As the perfect bookstore name continued to elude them, “it became a joke that we could always name it Diesel,” said Evans. “It was like a voice from a burning bush, is what we often say, because it kept happening over and over. It was the name most prominent in our minds.”

With DIESEL finally agreed upon, Evans and Reid went back to the drawing board to figure out how to avoid having people think the store provided travel or transportation goods. The second half of the store’s name was inspired by a hair salon in Oakland: Lisa’s, A Hair Shop.

Over the years, the bookstore has been confused with the Diesel clothing company on occasion, said Evans, and people have called the store to ask for books on diesel engines, which staff happily helps them with.

Otherwise, DIESEL staffers don’t mind saying the name every day, customers tend to like the name, and regular customers especially feel a great affinity for it.

“And we did tell the neighbor that the bookstore was named after her dog,” said Evans.