North Figueroa Bookshop May Be Funded and Supported by Publishers, But Its Owners and Mission Are As Indie as It Gets

By Max Bell
FROM: Los Angeles Times

Highland Park has changed radically in the last two decades. As in Silver Lake and Echo Park before it, the predominantly Latino community has been inundated with artisanal coffee shops, high-priced bars, tony restaurants and vintage boutiques that have raised rents and displaced longtime residents. Despite gentrification’s revolving door of new businesses on the hipster highways of York Boulevard and Figueroa Street, few bookstores have materialized or endured.

Book Show, a queer-friendly store with a quirky collection of new and used books and zines, closed in 2019. Pricey art bookstore Owl Bureau, which one Yelp reviewer maligned as “the apex of hipster gentrification,” shut down for renovations in 2021 with no word of reopening. York’s the Pop-Hop opened at the edge of Highland Park in 2012 and has been the community’s lone bookstore for many years. Now there is a new shop in town, with community roots and the backing of publishers large and small: North Figueroa Bookshop.

Co-founded by local independent publishers Unnamed Press and Rare Bird Lit, North Figueroa opened last November. It might be Highland Park’s first independent store exclusively selling new books this century. It’s certainly the first with multiple large publishers as founding sponsors. Support from Grove Atlantic (the counterculture champion turned indie paragon) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (via its young, hip imprint MCD Books) ensures that both presses, like Unnamed and Rare Bird, have sections dedicated to their books.

While publishers have paid for preferential bookshelf placement for years, it’s rare for a store to dedicate multiple sections to individual publishers. But this isn’t exactly pay-to-play. Chris Heiser of Unnamed and Rare Bird’s Tyson Cornell have a more unified vision for publishing and bookselling. Call it vertical integration for the little guy. In a neighborhood catering to artisanal brands, why not tout craft imprints as you would craft beers? Read Rest of Aticle Here