East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, Calif., which was destroyed by a fire in July, will officially reopen on Saturday, November 30, in a temporary space at 6022 College Ave.
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| A tour of the new East Bay Booksellers work-in-progress. | |
Store owner Brad Johnson and his team will celebrate the reopening that afternoon with a toast to the bookstore's community and "to all that goes into making a good bookstore great." In the announcement, he noted: "you'll excuse if there aren't a lot of party preparations & favors. We'll probably be shelving books to get things ready up to the opening hours that morning."
The bookstore was a "total loss" following the three-alarm fire that broke out on July 30, and damage to the building was so extensive that investigators could not discover what caused the fire. Customers and community members rallied around the bookstore in the wake of the fire, and a GoFundMe campaign supporting East Bay Booksellers raised a total of $232,868.
In his message announcing the reopening, Johnson wrote: "If East Bay Booksellers is valuable at all, it is precisely because you have shown that you want it to be a part of your worlds... of who you are." The support the bookstore received was "powerful stuff," and "frankly, it gave us the strength to endure what many assumed would be unendurable as a business."
In October, Johnson told the San Francisco Chronicle that the bookstore will likely remain in the temporary space for at least six months.