Des Pair Books has opened in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Calif., featuring new fiction, classics, art and cinema titles and "an excellent selection of cookbooks," Vanity Fair reported. The owner is Addison Richley, who worked at Gagosian, in its Beverly Hills and one of its New York City galleries, before joining the Karma gallery in the East Village, where she was the archivist.
Richley had "dreamed of a bookstore" and thought seriously about opening one when she was ill last year. "During my last summer in New York, I got sick and spent most of those months in bed, so I had a lot of time to think about my career," she said. "I just kept working at it, and things began to fall into place in a way that felt like the right transition."
Vanity Fair wrote that Des Pair Books "feels like an actual store with a point of view. Most days, you will find Richley behind the counter, her dog Maude lounging beside her, happy to recommend a title; Violette Leduc's La Bâtarde and Michel Houellebecq's Serotonin are her current favorites."
Richley is also busy working on a related project: Seasons of Des Pair, a quarterly zine that launches this summer. "The final product is a fun grouping of poems, short stories, and essays and will be designed by the creative studio Day Job," she said. The cover artwork is by a Los Angeles artist, AJ Kahn, who will have an exhibition in the store when the zine launches.