The Outer Sunset bookstore that opens at midnight

On Noriega Street between 45th and 46th, in a 280-square-foot former laundromat, Hassan Awad runs a bookstore he calls The Last Word. It is open Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 1 a.m. until 4 a.m. and not at any other time. The window has a hand-painted sign that reads, in small black letters: HOURS, SEE INSIDE.

Hassan is 39. He grew up in the Outer Sunset. He worked at Green Apple Books on Clement for nine years before starting The Last Word in 2021. He sells used poetry, contemporary fiction, and what he calls “small philosophy”, slim books that fit in a coat pocket. He does not sell self-help or business books. He has, gently but firmly, asked four customers over four years to leave when they asked for those.

On a typical night, between four and twelve people come in. They are mostly nurses on the way home from shifts at UCSF or Kaiser. A few cabdrivers. A few bartenders. Occasionally a college student trying to be the kind of person who buys a book at 2:30 a.m.

Total sales on a typical night, by Hassan’s own ledger: $11. The store grosses about $13,000 a year. Hassan loses about $9,000 a year on it. He works days as a freelance translator (Arabic to English, technical documents for engineering firms). The translation work funds the bookstore.

“I am not running a bookstore,” he says. “I am running a room for the people the rest of the city has closed for. The books are how I justify the rent.”

The cat is named Layla. She has been there since 2022. She came in one night through a hole in the back wall that Hassan has since patched everywhere except one corner about the size of a teacup, which is Layla’s.

The selection on the night I visited at 2:31 a.m.: a Yusef Komunyakaa collection, a Lydia Davis short story collection, a Han Kang novella in English translation, and a 1973 paperback of Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’ with a previous owner’s pencil notes in the margins. A nurse named Cassandra bought the Calvino for $4. Hassan does not negotiate on price. The prices, he says, are already low.

The store has been written up twice in alt-weeklies and once in a national magazine. Hassan declines all interviews about how to run a small business. He says the question is the wrong question. The right question, he says, is what kind of room the city is missing.

At 4:01 a.m. he locked the door, fed Layla, turned off the desk lamp at the register, and walked the eight blocks home in the cold fog. He had taken in $7 that night. He had given a book to a teenager who said she could not afford it. He counted the night a good one.