On the last day at her bookshop, Karen Kropp remains surrounded by stories.
In the days after the 78-year-old owner of the Book Rack in Arcadia announced she was closing the store after 40 years, customers new and old turned up at the First Avenue location to shop and commiserate.
“It’s been a circus and though it was a terrible decision to make, it’s been a good run,” said Kropp in her warm contralto. She worked at the store before taking over the reins 18 years ago. “This was my happy, even when I was just an employee. I got really lucky. I got to do something I loved and learn while I was doing it.”
Declining sales worsened by the pandemic as well as her upcoming 80th birthday precipitated the closure, which Kropp hoped to stave off by cashing in her life insurance and a GoFundMe started by an employee.
“Thank you for all your years of making us literate, and happy and sad,” Lisa Watkins, 62, of Monrovia told Kropp. She remembers her mother Michael taking her to the Book Rack’s first location on Baldwin Avenue in her early teens.
“When my mother got older, I would bring her here, we kind of switched roles,” Watkins said. “(Karen) could find almost any book I was looking for, and if she couldn’t, she’d put me on a waiting list and call when a copy came in.”
Sergio Perez rummaged through moving boxes, looking for dictionaries and how-to books requested by inmates who write in to the Prison Library Project in Claremont, where he serves as director. Deputies from the Los Angeles County Jail hauled 48 boxes of books of almost every genre to a volunteer’s pickup.
Dianne Gallardo MacNeil called out genres to help everyone picking through what remains of the Book Rack’s stock: “Who wants Westerns? Who’s looking for history? Children’s books in the back.”
MacNeil has known Kropp for years, since she started going to the Book Rack to replenish offerings at the Los Amigos of the East L.A. Library store. She said Kropp…
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