About Us

NORTH FIGUEROA BOOKSHOP is a general interest bookstore in the heart of the historic Highland Park neighborhood of Northeast Los Angeles, a joint venture of Rare Bird and Unnamed Press, two Los Angeles–based independent book publishers, with the collaborative support of founding publisher sponsors, Grove Atlantic and MCD Books.

The store directly serves the neighborhoods of Highland Park, Glassell Park, and Eagle Rock, and is a beautiful, custom-design literary space that seeks to connect the independent publishing community with readers, booksellers, authors, and book lovers. The store's shelves hold a rotating selection of titles from our publishing partners, as well as a curated general interest selection with a focus on California history and literature, literature in translation, books in Spanish, and independent press publications.

As publishers, Rare Bird and Unnamed have been collaborating on projects for the last few years. The first of which, Shadows of Love, Shadows of Loneliness, a landmark two-volume retrospective of William T. Vollmann's photography, art, and printing, is scheduled for release in 2023.

STORE MANAGER

Mads Gobbo is a writer, illustrator, and bookseller living in Los Angeles. She has served as events manager at Skylight Books, the store artist at The Booksmith, and inventory coordinator at Printed Matter, Inc. In 2022, Mads cofounded Hand Follows Eye Studios, a mobile arts education business with a queer and feminist focus. She holds an MA in Fiction from UC Davis and a BA from Kenyon College.

UNNAMED PRESS

Unnamed Press is a leading independent publisher of fiction and nonfiction, based in Los Angeles and founded in 2014. Unnamed titles represent a diverse list of voices—ones that challenge conventional perspectives while appealing to a broad general audience: exciting, radical, urgent. The company nurtures emerging talent and partner with more established authors to help their platform grow, and its books have been widely praised and featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, NPR, NBC, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Miami Herald,  Chicago Review of BooksPlayboy, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other outlets. Unnamed authors include Man Booker, Granta Best American Novelist, Philip K. Dick, and Pulitzer Prize award winners, and have been finalists for many other book prizes. You can find out more about the press in articles at the Los Angeles TimesPublishers Weekly, and Poets & Writers, among other places.

RARE BIRD

Rare Bird is a Los Angeles–based publishing company founded in 2010 by Tyson Cornell, former Marketing and Publicity Director of Book Soup, a legendary independent bookstore on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California. Rare Bird publishes fifty books and records a year with hundreds of authors, including Jack Kerouac, William T. Vollmann, Francesca Lia Block, Bella Thorne, Keith Buckley, Ashley Blue, Jerry Stahl, Record Store Day, Jerry A, Abigail Tartellin, Chip Jacobs, Frank Capra, and J. G. Ballard, among many others. Rare Bird also releases vinyl audiobooks, as well as singles, EPs, compilations, and full-length records with music artists, including Mark Lanegan, Scout larue Willis, Nikki Sixx, Frank Bello, Blag Dahlia, Speedbuggy, Andy Biersack, and more.

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