Carla Cohen’s 1984 shop, Barbara Meade’s partnership and a move across the street.

Politics and Prose was Carla Cohen’s idea. Publishers Weekly, in an obituary published on 11 October 2010, said she started the bookshop after a career in government and urban planning, opening it in 1984 in a small storefront on Connecticut Avenue in northwest Washington, D.C. English Wikipedia says she had no experience of running a business and found her partner, Barbara Meade, through the classifieds; Meade had managed a bookstore before. Publishers Weekly said Meade, the store manager, became a partner in 1985, and Wikipedia, like a Summer 2000 profile in the Vassar Quarterly, treats the two women as the shop’s founders.

The name was chosen at the start. Wikipedia says Cohen chose Politics and Prose because it sounded like Washington without being pretentious, and that Meade worried the name might put people off. The Vassar Quarterly profile set the record straight in 2000: despite the name, it wrote, Politics and Prose is a general, not a political, bookstore. Bradley Graham, one of the current owners, made the same point to the Washington Independent Review of Books in April 2012, saying that the name’s emphasis does not mean the shop takes other forms of writing any less seriously. The shop is also known as P&P, the short form used by its owners in a 2017 statement to Shelf Awareness.

The shop soon outgrew its storefront. Publishers Weekly said that five years after opening, in 1989, Politics and Prose moved to larger rooms across the street, and Wikipedia gives the same year. The Vassar Quarterly recorded how it was done: on a hot Sunday in July, customers turned out to pack the books and carry them over to the new shop. Wikipedia says the store merged with a nearby children’s bookshop, the Cheshire Cat, in 1990 and took on its staff, and the Vassar Quarterly said a coffeehouse was added in 1993. Wikipedia names the in-store café Modern Times.

Talks, reading groups, classes and a print-on-demand machine.

Much of the shop’s character is a programme of events rather than a look. The Vassar Quarterly described nightly readings by well-known and lesser-known authors, hundreds of registered reading groups and more than a dozen discussion groups run by the store itself, including one for middle-school students. Wikipedia says the author talks follow a set pattern, with a reading from the new book followed by questions from the audience, and that recordings of many talks are published online.

The Washington Independent Review of Books, in its 10 April 2012 feature by Sarah Vogelsong, described how the new owners widened that programme. Daytime classes ranged from courses on Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot to memoir-writing workshops and a session called “Knit lit”, while evening rooms were kept for author talks and book clubs. Graham and Muscatine were also planning literary trips built around the writers of particular places. The same feature said the shop had bought a print-on-demand machine and offered e-books through its website; Wikipedia identifies the machine as an Espresso Book Machine, used to print self-published and out-of-print titles.

Graham’s own description of the shop in that interview was “a gathering place, a community center”, and he said coming in each day felt less like going to an office than going to a community centre. That idea of the bookshop as a public room sits alongside the name and the P&P short form at the centre of the shop’s identity.

A name that sounds like Washington, and a shop that sells everything.

Some bookshops take their identity from the building they occupy before any sign goes up. A shop in a former theatre, warehouse, garage or bank inherits ceiling heights, columns, stairs and windows it did not design, and those features often end up doing the work a logo might do elsewhere. Exposed trusses, a balcony or an old frontage become the backdrop to every photograph and every event, and they are hard to copy in a branch somewhere else. When such a shop moves, the question becomes what to carry with it: the shelving, the fixtures, a sign, or only the name. Keeping one physical element from the old rooms can give regular customers a thread of continuity in an unfamiliar space.

Inside, a great deal of the identity is handwritten. Staff recommendation cards clipped to shelves give each bookseller a small public voice, and their handwriting, paper stock and length vary from card to card in a way a printed label does not. Events and readings add a calendar to the identity: posters, a printed or emailed programme, a chair layout and a microphone stand become recurring images of the shop. Gift wrapping at the till, loyalty cards stamped or punched by hand and a store newsletter written by staff all carry the name into homes. When a larger company buys an independent shop and keeps its name, these local habits are often what keeps the shop recognisable to the people who used it before, so for designers the task is to document them as carefully as the mark itself.

A sale, two journalists and new branches across the city.

The founders decided to sell in June 2010, as the Washington Independent Review of Books recorded. Carla Cohen died on 11 October 2010, as Publishers Weekly and Shelf Awareness reported that week, and Wikipedia says her husband, David Cohen, inherited her stake. On 28 March 2011, Fine Books & Collections reported, Barbara Meade and David Cohen announced that they had chosen Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine, who had met as reporters at The Washington Post, as the new owners. The Washington Independent Review of Books dated the signed contract to June 2011 and noted that neither had worked in bookselling before; Graham spent time visiting independent booksellers around the country before taking over. Graham and Muscatine have owned Politics and Prose since 2011, and Wikipedia says Meade retired from the store at the end of 2012.

The new owners took the name beyond its corner of northwest Washington. Wikipedia says that in 2014 the shop began running small branches inside Busboys and Poets restaurants, and Shelf Awareness reported on 30 May 2017 that this arrangement was ending and that a branch would open in the Union Market district of Northeast Washington, in renovated warehouses next to the indoor market as a freestanding branch. A second branch, at The Wharf on the Southwest Waterfront, opened earlier: Shelf Awareness reported on 3 November 2017 that it had opened the previous month and that Union Market would follow early in 2018.

The same report covered the main shop. Politics and Prose was taking over the former dry cleaner next door; the owners said the new retail space would have much the same look as the existing store but with a skylight and an extra checkout desk, and that the space freed downstairs would become a classroom. They called the store’s history one of “periodic expansion” and tied it to the northwest neighbourhoods that had supported P&P since 1984.

For a design guide, Politics and Prose shows how a bookshop can be known by a memorable name, a two-letter short form and a busy programme of talks and classes rather than by a formal visual system. Compare Tattered Cover, a Denver bookshop that also grew across several locations, and Powell’s Books, a Portland shop known by its family name. For this guide we use avenue navy, brick red and newsprint with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Politics and Prose’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.