Julian Richardson; Owner of Marcus Bookstore

Julian Richardson, 84, owner of San Francisco’s Marcus Bookstore, which served as a meeting place for black artists and activists. Richardson established the bookstore in 1960, naming it for Marcus Garvey, the black nationalist writer and activist. The store became a staple of black culture in the San Francisco Bay Area and was a gathering place for Black Panther supporters during the civil rights era. Through the years, writers such as Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, Terry MacMillan and Cornel West have visited the bookstore. Richardson, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, had studied lithography and operated his own printing business. He used his skills to print books, pamphlets and manuscripts on black culture that otherwise were difficult to obtain on the West Coast. On Monday in San Francisco of heart failure.