The Book Jewel opened last Saturday, Independent Bookstore Day, in the Westchester area of Los Angeles, Calif. Karen Dial, who owns the store with her brother, Jim Drollinger, told the Argonaut, "This is a dream come true for me!" The siblings also own Drollinger Properties, a property management and commercial real estate brokerage firm.
"The community has been waiting," continued Dial, who has been a champion of public art and president of the business improvement district. "They've been watching for about four years while the construction was taking place. So every time someone drove by, they were like, 'When is that going to open?' So there's been a lot of interesting conversations. But we've also been cooped up in our homes for so many months now. It's been a delight to hear people say, as they walk through the door, 'Oh my gosh, we're finally out of the house! We've been reading but we're sick of ordering on Amazon. We want a real bookstore!' "
The store has 3,000 square feet of space and housed a toy store as well as a grocery store and dollar store before being extensively renovated to create the Book Jewel, named after the owners' mother, who was an avid reader.
The store manager is Sean Moor, who for 10 years has owned and operated Gatsby Books in Long Beach, which he described as "a self-sufficient store now," allowing him to work full time at the Book Jewel, where he's "basically building the store of Karen's dreams and fortunately, our dreams are the same," he said.
The Argonaut described the store as a "stylish, modern space, accented with crimson fan-like lighting fixtures... designed to magically transform into an event space."
Next door, Dial's daughter Natalie and her fiancé, Harry Posner, plan to open Tomat, a restaurant with its own event space and rooftop deck and garden, sometime next year.