"After some years away from the shop, it became clear that my heart was still in it," said Phyllis Cohen, the owner of Berkeley Books of Paris, an English-language bookstore in the French capital. She helped get the store up and running with two friends in 2005, and then spent several years away from bookselling to work for the United Nations in the Hague. Now, she's bought the store, relaunched its website and jumped back into bookselling.
"I realized that I'm something of a born bookseller," she said. "I just couldn't stay away from it for more than a couple of years, even though my work at the U.N. was beyond fascinating." Her bookselling career began on another continent, when she was just 20 years old; she spent her "cub bookseller" days at a long-since closed store in New York City called Chapter and Verse, before working at Posman Books in Greenwich Village. By the time she was 24, she was managing the store.
Cohen first traveled to Paris in 1999 as an exchange student, where "contrary to all nay saying," she immediately landed a part-time job at an American used bookstore called San Francisco Book Company. She returned to the U.S. to finish college, and bought a one-way ticket back to Paris immediately after her graduation in June of 2000. After her return to Paris she worked again at San Francisco Book Company, where she met Phil Wood and Richard Toney, with whom she started Berkeley Books in 2005. Wood financed the starting of the store and was its principal owner until Cohen purchased the store this year.
Today, Berkeley Books of Paris is an approximately 322 square foot general-interest used bookstore, packed with some 10,000 English-language volumes. It resides in the Sixth Arrondissement, which Cohen called the city's "cultural heart."
"The neighborhood is a real stunner if you happen to be a bookshop," she said, describing her community as one made up largely of professors and students, with about a 65% to 35% split between locals and tourists. Philosophy, literary fiction, vintage pocketbooks and poetry typically do well. "The streets are alive with literary history from the 1920s onward. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier had their bookshops just around the corner. The Jardin du Luxembourg, where the young Hemingway hung out with Gertrude Stein, is just up the street."
Cohen's first major change since taking ownership was completely rebuilding the store's website, and she has a long list of further changes to make. She plans to get rid of the store's "chaff" and shape the inventory into a "lovingly curated collection of vintage and rare books." She also wants to begin introducing new books to the store.
"While it's not really in the DNA of used bookstores, there are far too many excellent new books and inspired publishers out there to limit ourselves to serendipity, to just buying the best used books that come in the shop," she elaborated. "I really want to turn people on to Melville House, to the NYRB classics series, to Believer magazine, to small press poets."
Beyond that, Cohen intends to make community events, such as readings and author visits, her top priority. She's going to retake the reins of a "fledgling poetry reading series" that she started before leaving for the U.N., and has already reached out to Hawthorne Books in Portland, Ore., about hosting coordinated readings in store. She also plans to invite Melville House and McSweeney's, among other publishers, a little further down the line.
Cohen, Wood and Toney are the only employees, and Cohen, in fact, is still in the process of leaving the U.N.--her move-in day for Paris is March 8.
"It's a bit like the army, in that it's harder getting out than it is getting in," she said of the U.N. "And it's none too easy getting in." --Alex Mutter
