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t any given time, you’ll find between two and 10 autodidacts lounging in burgundy leather chairs at Mother Foucault’s. Some of them might even be teenagers. “The high school freaks of Portland, Oregon, love Mother Foucault’s,” one of the store’s interns, 19-year-old Ro Runkel, told me. Reading Hegel didn’t win him many pals at Grant High School, but Runkel found his people at the bookshop.

Inspired by owner Craig Florence’s time working at Paris’s Shakespeare and Company (a hub for English-speaking expat writers and readers since 1951), Mother Foucault’s is an old-world paradise for artists and intellectuals. The aesthetic lends authenticity to Runkel’s Platonic dialogues. “I took my boyfriend here on our first date so he would think I was cool,” he says. And the kids love that Florence doesn’t care if they buy anything. “You can park your ass in a chair and read a book for an hour and a half,” Runkel says. “Three hours!” chimes fellow intern Matteo Ponzi, also 19.

Faced with the shop’s massive inventory of vintage books, visitors might be surprised to learn that Mother Foucault’s opened just a short 15 years ago, in a shabby storefront on SE Morrison Street. Equally surprising is how permanent it already feels in its new space a block away on SE Grand, where it moved after its lease ran out at the end of 2024. The new shop has the same fake fireplace, same catwalk, same stage, and same polyglot collection arranged pell-mell on every surface. To the antique displays and Persian rugs, Florence added an updated typewriter station in the front window, an expanded reading area, and a shaded back patio with garden seating. There are still no laptops or smartphones allowed.

Florence had eyed the new location for years, a former post office with two upper levels on top of a street-side storefront. More space meant more opportunities to host the shop’s amorphous community and ever-expanding events calendar. Past the loitering youths and the expected readings and small-press book launches (I’ve participated in several events there myself), Mother Foucault’s has been home to temporary galleries and artists’ studios. It hosts a monthly event called Other People’s Poems, where anyone can show up and read aloud other people’s poetry. There are even small-scale concerts.

Moving set in motion a larger plan to formalize the thriving scene for which Mother Foucault’s has become its own kind of community center. Setting up a nonprofit, named l’École Buissonnière, was the first step. But a larger ambition is to buy the building, guaranteeing the community’s ongoing survival and assuaging the ever-present worry that your landlord might push you out. “In the world of bookselling,” Florence says, “owning the building is the Holy Grail.”

Slashed National Endowment for the Arts grants and a contracting city budget have thrown many local arts and culture organizations into financial precarity. Though it is a for-profit business, Mother Foucault’s has always operated as an ad hoc cooperative. Volunteers, interns, and friends—Florence’s ragtag Knights of the Round Table—trade their time for space on the events calendar and, more than anything, a place to be in community. While it’s not directly threatened by throttled government coffers and can function as a for-us-by-us organization uniquely resilient to the whims of elected officials, a business that relies on the faith, goodwill, and free time of people experiencing their own share of instability is precarious in a squeezed economy. “We just need more security,” Florence says.

In a funny twist of fate, directly across the street from Mother Foucault’s sits a very aboveboard counterpart to Florence’s project. Literary Arts, the nonprofit behind the Portland Book Festival and the Oregon Book Awards, opened its new headquarters—a bookshop, café, event and education space, and much else—a few months before Mother Foucault’s moved. Andrew Proctor, Literary Arts’ executive director, says he sees what could be a rivalry as an easy symbiosis. Proctor mentions how the new-only inventory at Literary Arts’ shop complements Florence’s eccentric used collection, and vice versa; the two send each other business. Different strokes, sure, but both institutions are vital not because they cater to certain preferences but because, by catering to those certain preferences, they’re able to make reading and learning and engaging with the larger arts community approachable and accessible to different swathes of Portlanders.

Florence started his dreams of ownership with a grand gesture. In a GoFundMe pitch to fundraise $300,000 for a down payment in just a couple of months, he wrote about preserving the place that had served as “an incubator, a stage, a meeting space, a dream space (and a dream) for writers and artists of all stripes.” It was an inspired call to action, if perhaps a bit overambitious, considering that the shop’s devotees aren’t exactly rich. This is not a shop designed for collectors or academics, Florence says: “It’s for people who are pursuing their independent scholarly or literary or poetic things.” The campaign closed a few hundred grand short of its goal, raising $16,664 total. But the people hanging around the shop each day prove the fundraising woes are not due to a lack of buy-in. Instead, the stunted campaign speaks to the need for security Florence mentions.

When establishing l’École Buissonnière (from a French term for playing hooky), the larger Mother Foucault’s cohort assembled a board of involved regulars—a group that shares in the vision of building on and sustaining its legacy as a countercultural institution. One board member, the artist and curator Martha Daghlian, is also the de facto manager of the second floor, 711 Studios, where she and a handful of artists sublet studio space from Florence. Daghlian first showed her own work in the old shop in 2023, then began hosting Grapefruits, her roaming art gallery, in its rare book room. For the time being, 711’s events look like open studios, where artists welcome the public into their workspace to informally show works in progress. Ido Radon, another local artist and curator, converted her studio at 711 into a project space called Society, where she hosts artist talks and quarterly gallery shows.

At the inaugural open studio in August, the party spilled into the bookshop and ran long past closing time. The atmosphere was charged with the electric din of excited conversation (aided by wine and cocktails). Weirdo bibliophiles, elder statespeople of the Portland arts scene, interns Runkel and Ponzi, and everyone in between chatted over snacks and shared cigarettes on the patio. A few nights later, cellist and bookshop acolyte Zachery Gerzon hosted an indie rock show in the store. While Mother Foucault’s has always held a smattering of music shows in addition to readings, in the new space Gerzon books the stage a few nights each week, with acts ranging from acoustic singer-songwriters to experimental noise groups. 

Long term, the plan is for l’École Buissonnière to set up a formal office on the third floor, where it would host a writer’s residency, classes, and a translation program. One day, Florence hopes the nonprofit can raise funds to become a part-owner of the building.

In the spirit of his French-bohemian past, Florence proudly talks of literature, art, music, and poetry as essential to the maintenance of a liberated populace, and of spaces like Mother Foucault’s as hallowed ground. “Freedom of thought and freedom of expression, you know, that goes away if you’re not exercising it,” he says. “What if we end up in a place where there is no poetry and no art? We want to promote that culture and say to people, ‘Hey, this is a real way to live.’”