The Iliad Bookshop

Dan Weinstein, whose father owned used book stores around the SFV, opened his own in 1987. Amazingly, it has stayed open surviving the digital era. It's proof that there will always be a place in this world for the musty smell of books with dog-eared pages yellowed with age or maybe it points to the fact that all businesses need cats as part of the staff. They even had to UPsize the store moving from a 3,000-square-foot to a 6,000-square-foot store. The name which seems appropriate for a purveyor of more than 100,000 used books actually came from the old days when the first bookstore opened up next to the out-of-business Odyssey Video. While YouTube killed the video star, the Iliad keeps going decades after it began. (Submitted by Eric Bristol)