If you're tired of the bright lights at Borders or the literary air at City Lights, check out these dive bookstores located (appropriately) in the gritty streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin district.

Kayo Books
814 Post Street
(415) 749-0554
www.kayobooks.com

Camp filmmaker, John Waters, and hardboiled novelist, Richard Price, swear by Kayo Books. "It's like the congressional library of historical sleaze," raves Price on the Kayo Books' website.

An hour at Kayo offers a whirlwind tour of American pop culture. Stacks of magazines from the 1950s and 60s include a little something for her—Woman's Day, House Beautiful and McCall's, and for him—Adam and Dude. There are also classic comics from Mad, DC Comix and R. Crumb.

Vintage mass-market paperbacks are shelved under section headers that are lurid and inspired: "Prostitution/Catholic Guilt," "H-Bomb and Other Bad Things," "Red Scare" or "The Unexplainable."

The pearl in Kayo's collection is their pulp fiction. You could lose yourself for hours reading the campy cover copy. A Road Divided shows a buxom but chaste looking blonde in pedal pushers hitching a ride with a teaser that reads: "She was not the free and easy type that Shane had heard about, but this made her even more desirable." Or gems like: "9-5 at the office wasn't for her...not when belly dancing could shimmy her into the big time." Kitschy zingers like these keep pulp aficionados coming back for more.

The Magazine
920 Larkin St
(415) 441-7737

Just a block up from The Century strip club, The Magazine peddles...magazines. Their specialty is vintage porn, but with the dark wood shelves and deco ceiling lights the place looks more like a genteel library circa 1950 than a smut emporium.

Men leaf nervously through the pages of beefcake glossies and the space swims in a furtive atmosphere, but there's also a wealth of other treasures such as movie memorabilia and back issues of mainstream magazines. Recent issues of The New Yorker or Vanity Fair are a steal at 35 cents and many of them are dated within the last month or two.

The Magazine also carries dime novels, old California history and travel books, and frameable head shots of Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis for $3-$10 a pop.

McDonald's Books
48 Turk St.
(415) 673-2235

A sign in front of McDonald's Books trumpets the joint as "A Dirty, Poorly Lit Place for Books." The sign is right. In the window, a couple of old Playboys and mass-market paperbacks from the 70s fade and collect dust. Inside rough-hewn shelves that look like Dad's first woodworking project hold one million (at least that's what the store claims) aging and downright weird titles such as The Medical Uses of Soap or Why They Behave Like Russians.

Numerous signs encourage browsers to "Please Put Books Back." This DIY shelving technique combined with the shop owner's benign neglect encourage a filing system that is careless, magical and let's face it, a mess. On the mezzanine level, stacks and stacks of old National Geographic, Look, Life, TV Guide and Popular Mechanics are a collage artist's dream.

McDonald's has been in business since 1926. Owner Itzhak Volansky mans the register and mutters jokingly, "What keeps me in this part of town?" Then answers his own question: "Masochism. We're not on the Gray Line tour. The only people who wander in here are lost tourists and artists."