Politics and Prose Bookstore Founder Carla Cohen Has Died

By Jason Boog 

Carla Cohen, the founder of Washington DC’s Politics and Prose Bookstore, has passed away.

Cohen (pictured, via) opened the bookstore in 1984. The bookstore site has this tribute: “Cohen’s entire background was anti-business so it was amusing to her family and all who knew her that Cohen decided to start a bookstore.  It was, however, just like the contrarian character she had inherited that she chose a part of retail then being nationalized.  It was a time at which small, independent bookstores were beginning to perish in large numbers.”

Add your tributes to the bookseller at this link.

Here’s more from the Washington Post‘s obituary: “Mrs. Cohen was a former urban planner who conceived of Politics and Prose as a salon where Washington readers and writers could gather to challenge each other in discussion about the big ideas of the day — a place that would reach beyond customers’ pocketbooks and become part of their lives. That concept proved wildly successful.” (Via Sarah Weinman)