An Interview with Laurie Gillman of East City Bookshop

Reflecting on the first five years of running an indie bookstore

East City Bookshop on Capitol Hill turned five years old this month. I’m lucky enough to get to work there. I spoke to Laurie Gillman, its founder, for the Brit Lit Podcast, and here is some of what she told me about the process of opening and running a bookshop and keeping it going over the last, challenging year.

CH: Can you start by telling us a bit about yourself and about the bookshop you founded?

LG: I have lived in Washington DC for 30 years now, and in this neighborhood of Capitol Hill for 28 years. I grew up in Texas, so it still feels like that’s really home, but I’ve been here way longer than I was there.

East City Bookshop is in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington, DC, so literally a few blocks from the Capitol building. I started it five years ago because at that point we didn’t have a bookstore selling new books, and we had not had one for about six years. I realised that no-one was going to open a bookstore, so I decided to do that. My mid-life crisis!

CH: It’s hard to imagine Capitol Hill without a bookstore, because it’s a place where people read a lot and are very educated.

LG: Yes. And there was one here for 40 years that had been a family business. It was definitely a neighborhood bookstore, but it was more focused on Congress and working with Congress and sort of government agencies. It didn’t really have enough space for an event space.

Bookstores had reached the lowest point of trying to be businesses in 2009. There were very few bookstores and more were closing every year than were opening. And there was actually a fire and the business was getting more and more difficult [so it had to close].

CH: One of the things that’s great about independent bookshops is that each have their own individual characters, their personalities, the things they focus on. What would you say makes East City Bookshop special?

LG: I think it is the fact that it is such a neighborhood bookstore. It’s something I started not because I thought I really must open a bookstore, where can I put it? But I thought my…