Dave Nee, bookseller and science fiction/fantasy fan, died August 6. He was 73. Locus reported that he attended high school in the San Francisco Bay Area and studied at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1974, he co-founded the Portable Bookstore, with Debbie Notkin and Tom Whitmore, "as a service running books to local organizations. It would be renamed the Other Change of Hobbit and became a physical store in Berkeley at the suggestion of Sherry Gottlieb, founder of the eponymous bookstore A Change of Hobbit. The physical store relocated multiple times over the decades, finding homes in downtown Berkeley and El Cerrito, before closing in 2014."
In addition to being a bookseller, Nee wrote bibliographies for Thomas M. Disch and Michael Bishop in 1982 and 1983. He also had a long-time involvement with San Francisco Pride, being chair of the SF Pride Safety Committee.
In a tribute, Whitmore wrote in File 770: "It's next to impossible for me to summarize Dave Nee. We were friends for almost 60 years. We went to different Bay Area high schools, but I ended up hanging out with his school's drama class. We both attended UC Berkeley and were friends, then partners (with Debbie Notkin) in a small bookselling enterprise, The Portable Bookstore, which sold new books at Little Men's meetings and rare books at conventions. In 1977 that morphed into The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore....
"He and I had similar depths of knowledge in SF and fantasy, both in the history of the books and the history of the field. If I couldn't remember a story, he could, and vice versa. He had far more knowledge than I did in other fields: we'd interrupt the Monday night restocking at Other Change so he could call in to (and frequently win) a local classical musical station's weekly trivia contest. He liked (and knew deeply) a broader range of music than anyone else I know. He was excellent at training people. He loved the cats we had in the store. He excelled at devising tactical solutions to problems. And he inspired loyalty in a wide range of people.... If you knew any one part of Dave, you knew someone amazing."