By Dorany Pineda
FROM: L.A. Times

Reaching for a metaphor to describe what it’s like to launch a bookstore during a pandemic, Jennifer Caspar alights on the parable of the frog in the pot of water — the one that doesn’t notice it’s being gradually boiled alive.

“In the beginning of the pandemic, I was like, ‘Oh it’s just going to be six weeks and then things will be back to normal,’” Caspar, 54, recounted on a gloomy afternoon outside her Culver City bookstore, Village Well Books & Coffee, which opened its doors in January, L.A.’s worst month of the pandemic. “I never really questioned it, I just kept moving forward.”

She had a bookstore to open. She never panicked.

To use another waterlogged metaphor, she was swimming against the tide. For much of the past year, booksellers in Los Angeles and beyond have been contending not with startup logistics but instead a slew of economic hurdles and existential crises induced by the pandemic. Sales dropped 50% to 70% for many local bookstores. Some resorted to online fundraisers and public pleas for support. Many depended on the sales flood of the holiday season to get them out of the red, only to see it coincide with a massive surge in COVID-19 cases and a return to full shutdown. Some, such as Family Books on Fairfax Avenue, didn’t make it.

Caspar, in the meantime, was just getting started. Read Rest of Article Here