Inside Librairie, a new bookshop at Silver Lake’s Sunset Junction, you’ll find store owner Jackie DesForges behind the gardening books, tucked into a snug space that once held a refrigerator.
“This store has had several lives before me, and one of the previous tenants — he’s actually a couple doors down now, Gilly Flowers – did so well that he needed a bigger space, so he moved,” said DesForges, who’d opened Librairie just two weeks earlier, May 30, when we met at the shop. “He had a fridge here, and they said to me, Do you want a fridge? I said, not really. So they moved it out for me, and then I got to make my little nook.”
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Little, tiny, small, snug — these are all useful terms to describe the 180-square foot bookstore, which is located inside the leaf-covered walls of a building that sits next to Intelligentsia Coffee and Cafe Stella.
“I’m pretty sure I’m the smallest brick-and-mortar bookstore in L.A.,” says DesForges. “I thought it may be [cookbook-focused, Chinatown-located] Now Serving” — which is 500 square feet — “So I think I might have it.”
To find out more, we reached out to the American Booksellers Association, which has data on member stores — though not all bookshops are members.
“Librarie is the smallest brick-and-mortar bookstore among our members in Los Angeles,” says Ray T. Nelson of the ABA, which has 22 member stores in L.A. (If you’re curious about stores across Southern California, we have a map of more than 100 independent bookshops spanning from Santa Barbara to San Diego and from Santa Monica to San Bernardino and everywhere in-between.)
“It used to be a little bigger,” she says, explaining that a wall had been added to make room for a 10-seat caviar bar that will soon open right behind her. “There’s a tiny bar on the backside of my wall.”
DesForges stocks a mix of fiction, nonfiction and children’s titles, and her shelves are filled with books on nature, science, film, music, philosophy, art, design, photography and literature that focuses on women and queer perspectives.
“I want it to feel like a place where I wouldn’t be able to choose what to buy. That’s been a problem. I already bought some books for myself, and I’m like, I need to leave some things for the customers,” laughs DesForges.
“There’s some witchy stuff in there, writer and artist guides — categories that I, personally, was very interested in. And instead of dividing the store by only fiction, only nonfiction, only art, I wanted to mix it all into each category,” she says. “Especially with the space, just because it is so small, I figured if I grouped everything together in one category it’d be easier for people to navigate and work their way around.”
You don’t even need to work your way around to find a good book. One shopper took a step or two inside the doorway, picked up the closest thing — a copy of Maggie O’Farrell’s “Land” — and handed the novel and payment to DesForges, finishing the entire transaction in moments while a reporter petted her dog.
And there are more than books in stock. There are cyanotype kits, stickers, mending kits, journals and more — what DesForges calls “the analog stuff.”
“Analog activities are very important to me,” she says. “Things that get you off the screen that you have to use your hands for. I have notebooks over there. I have more crafty things. There are these really cool mending kits to fix your clothing. Reading cards, things like that, for screen break time.”
DesForges, who has an MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside’s Palm Desert low-residency program and is managing editor of the journal Air/Light, among other endeavors, says she’d dreamed of opening a bookstore, but hadn’t planned on doing it until she was older: But just days after her boyfriend showed her the space, her beloved grandmother passed away and left her a sum that seemed just the right amount to get started.
“I felt like the universe was telling me to go for it,” says DesForges, who explained that the store’s name was inspired by a ’70s-era photograph taken by a friend of her father’s of a now-defunct Paris bookshop, Librairie DesForges. Her father got the image, which had for years hung in the family home, mounted for her, and it now sits in the shop. “It’s just always been a part of my life,” she says of the photo.
On this Saturday, it’s busy inside the store as couples, parents with children, solo browsers and dogs check out the new addition to the neighborhood. DesForges says several writers and possibly a celebrity have already come by to welcome her to the neighborhood.
Everyone, it seems, is pleased to have a new bookstore in the neighborhood.
“Nice people every time. I keep waiting for a mean one,” she says. “Not yet.”
Map: 100 Southern California independent bookstores to visit in 2026