Get the glow
Young designers in Oakland’s Temescal District? You bet. Amy Cools has been exploring clothing design since she was a child, and last summer she opened her cheerful shop, afterglow, on Telegraph, where she stocks her own creations (AC Clothing and Bags—dresses, pants, tops, jeans and purses) and features other local designers (Nicacelly, Porcelynne, Cara Lynden and Riquelle Small, to name a few), as well as some Oaklandish offerings.
Self-taught in the art of design, Cools loves to work with bright, saturated colors and to showcase vintage fabrics. Check out her empress-waist knit dresses in red/pink or blue/green, her lightweight, berry-colored hoodies with rainbow-striped waist and cuffs, her zip-cardigans that incorporate vintage materials, or her patch-stripe petticoats made of extra pieces of vintage fabric. She chose her shop’s name because it reminds her of “lingering joy and things that last.”
Says Cools, “I make everything with wearability and comfort in mind, so my customers feel comfortable, free and beautiful in their clothes.”
afterglow, 4233 Telegraph Ave.¸ Oakland, (510) 654-7514, www.acclothingandbags.com.
—Kate Madden Yee
A trip to the zoo
Erik Lyngen believes he has printer’s ink in his blood. “I’m not fit to do much else besides run a bookstore,” he says. After working at Oakland’s Walden Pond Bookstore, Lyngen teamed up with business partner Nick Raymond to reopen Book Zoo in a new Oakland locale last November. The store, formerly sited in Berkeley, buys, sells and trades used, rare and out-of-print tomes, and stocks some new selections in its poetry, radical politics and children’s sections.
If you stop by to look around, you’ll find an eclectic mix, from Maxfield Parrish Masterworks by Alma Gilbert and The Real Mother Goose (illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright, first printing 1916), to Hunter S. Thompson, Abbie Hoffman, Virginia Woolf and Isak Dinesen. Book Zoo also hosts free events like author readings and even live music. For Lyngen and Raymond, running an alternative bookstore is practically countercultural. “This is the most important way to use space,” Lyngen says.
Book Zoo, 6395 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, (510) 654-BOOK.
