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Housed in a three-story, 134-year-old building in inner Southeast, Mother Foucault’s (715 SE Grand Ave., 503-236-2665, motherfoucaultsbookshop.com) is the sort of bookstore you’d dream into being if it didn’t already exist—a labyrinthine warren of bookshelves and secret passages with a bar and catwalk and a hand-built rock-and-roll stage.
Two years ago, the shop was forced to move when its lease expired. Just a year later, the new building was also poised to go up for sale. The asking price was $1.6 million, a seemingly impossible sum.
Bookstore owner Craig Florence’s response was essentially, “Why not us?”
“Craig just decided, ‘What if I’m buying the building?’” remembers Clara-Julia Peru, an artist and poet who now runs French-language salons at Mother Foucault’s.
Alongside other friends of the bookstore and tenants of the upstairs artist studios, Florence enlisted Peru to form a nonprofit called L’École Buissonnière—literally, the school in the bushes, a French term for playing hooky. They plotted jazz shows and parties and fundraisers to raise the half-million dollars they’d need to secure the building. But a public GoFundMe netted just $55,000, a fraction of the sum.
Then a close friend invested in the building, and donors small and large began to arrive at the store. “They were people I didn’t really know, and they were like, ‘What do you need? I love what you’re trying to do,’” Florence said in July, smoking on the store’s back patio. A woman from the neighborhood, a sometime customer, stopped by in late 2025 to chat about the store’s plans.
“And then on January 1, she gave me a check for $100,000,” Florence said, still dumbfounded. The sale went through three weeks later.
The building is now home to a screen printing studio, a darkroom, a letter press, a small wood shop, a hive of artist studios, and a library space that will soon house the Black literature collection of Portland legend Fred Nemo. In an upstairs office, film critic and author Shawn Levy is at work on a book about David Lynch.
Mother Foucault’s feels like a self-contained universe, one where phones don’t exist (and aren’t allowed). Every five minutes on its back patio in July, someone stopped by to pay their respects, to bum a cigarette, to negotiate to buy art, or show off a new Ursula K. Le Guin screen print.
“My shop could be your life,” Florence laughed. “It’s just such a broad spectrum of people, different ages and people from totally different backgrounds that meet in this one place. It’s like a miniature little republic of letters.”
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2026 here!
