Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, April 16, and I’m writing from Los Angeles.
If one were to invent the platonic ideal of an only-in-Berkeley small business, they would be hard-pressed to come up with a place more delightfully specific and eclectic than Mrs. Dalloway’s, an independent neighborhood bookstore specializing in the “literary and garden arts.”
Along with its hand-curated literary selection, large children’s section and voluminous titles on all things garden-related, the store also sells seeds, plants and small gardening tools. Occasionally, customers will even schlep their ailing house plants into the cheery, green-walled store for diagnostic aid.
Mrs. Dalloway’s “has a calming effect that makes you want to linger — which is what a bookstore should be about,” John McMurtrie, the former books editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, said over email. “It has you slow down and get lost in the titles, making serendipitous discoveries.”
The name is, of course, a Virginia Woolf reference. Co-owner Marion Abbott said that the idea for the name came to her in the middle of the night, back when she and her business partner Ann Leyhe were still strategizing about the concept before opening the store in 2004.
Interior of Mrs. Dalloway’s boosktore. (Mrs. Dalloway’s)
“I just sat bolt upright and I said, the first line of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is ‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’”
How better to harmonize their slightly unlikely mashup of literature and horticulture than by riffing on one of the most famous opening sentences in 20th-century publishing? It didn’t hurt that the seminal novel had been published in 1925, the same year their College Avenue building was constructed, or that Abbott and Leyhe were nearly the same age as Woolf’s 51-year-old protagonist when they opened the bookstore.
The pair, who met fresh out of college while attending the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course in the summer of 1975, are both longtime Berkeley residents.
Over more than a decade and a half, they’ve built a powerhouse author events program, formed partnerships with local schools and survived a pandemic. They’ve also nurtured Mrs. Dalloway’s into an Elmwood community staple — McMurtrie described the bookstore and the constant stream of customers wandering in and out as “part of the flow of what makes the neighborhood vibrant.”
But the proprietors — who are now both in their late 60s — are ready to retire and pass the torch. On Thursday, they announced they were putting their award-winning bookstore up for sale and looking for a buyer to shepherd it into the future.
And not just any buyer. The women behind Mrs. Dalloway’s want to find the right person for the role — someone who will understand the heart and soul they’ve put into the business, and bring their own vision and energy to it. Leyhe told the East Bay Times that she also hopes a prospective buyer will be able to keep on the bookstore’s entire staff. The proprietors have prepared a detailed buyer’s guide, with information on the store and its assets, as well as what they are looking for in a buyer. They plan to interview interested parties.
Abbott made clear that while the pandemic had been difficult, it was far from the catalyst for selling the bookstore, which recently reopened for in-person browsing. “It’s not a fire sale,” she explained. “We are of a certain age. We’ve been doing this for 17 years, and we’ve been talking about retiring for a while.”
But Abbott did think the pandemic could play a role in a potential buyer’s decision, as people reevaluate their lives amid a reopening world.
“Maybe somebody is going to come along and say, you know, ‘I’ve always wanted to have a bookstore, I don’t want to be in tech anymore. I don’t want to be a lawyer anymore,” she hypothesized.
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