On the last day at her bookshop, Karen Kropp remains surrounded by stories.
In the days after the 78-year-old owner of the Book Rack in Arcadia announced she was closing the store after 40 years, customers new and old turned up at the First Avenue location to shop and commiserate.
“It’s been a circus and though it was a terrible decision to make, it’s been a good run,” said Kropp in her warm contralto. She worked at the store before taking over the reins 18 years ago. “This was my happy, even when I was just an employee. I got really lucky. I got to do something I loved and learn while I was doing it.”
Declining sales worsened by the pandemic as well as her upcoming 80th birthday precipitated the closure, which Kropp hoped to stave off by cashing in her life insurance and a GoFundMe started by an employee.
“Thank you for all your years of making us literate, and happy and sad,” Lisa Watkins, 62, of Monrovia told Kropp. She remembers her mother Michael taking her to the Book Rack’s first location on Baldwin Avenue in her early teens.
“When my mother got older, I would bring her here, we kind of switched roles,” Watkins said. “(Karen) could find almost any book I was looking for, and if she couldn’t, she’d put me on a waiting list and call when a copy came in.”
Sergio Perez rummaged through moving boxes, looking for dictionaries and how-to books requested by inmates who write in to the Prison Library Project in Claremont, where he serves as director. Deputies from the Los Angeles County Jail hauled 48 boxes of books of almost every genre to a volunteer’s pickup.
Dianne Gallardo MacNeil called out genres to help everyone picking through what remains of the Book Rack’s stock: “Who wants Westerns? Who’s looking for history? Children’s books in the back.”
MacNeil has known Kropp for years, since she started going to the Book Rack to replenish offerings at the Los Amigos of the East L.A. Library store. She said Kropp was always generous with her donations.
“It’s unfortunate things like this happen, because books save us,” she said.
Jimmy Recinos took the A Line from Los Angeles to pay his respects to Kropp and her life’s work. He bought a mystery paperback, one on history and a novel, “I Hate the Internet” by Jarrett Kobek.
“What an incredible legacy she established in our time,” he said. “Every book is worth something. It can liberate a mind, it can serve as a place of refuge at any age. Books matter. They make all the difference in the world. They are the best gift.”
Peter Tran of La Puente became a Book Rack customer about 20 years ago, when he lived in the area. After he retired, he volunteered to deliver books Kropp donated to hospitals and Little Libraries every month.
“This is something she loved, being around books and connecting with people,” he said. “How many of us can say that? It’s like a dream, and book lovers are all dreamers. I love her friendliness. She makes you feel like you’re family, and she always went the extra mile to find a book. I was extremely sad to hear (the news.) This place is like a part of me.”
Kropp greeted a steady parade of book lovers saying goodbye and thanks. Longtime customer Steve Skrah and his crew dismantled tables and shelves to be repurposed through his Monrovia handyman business.
“I’m a heavy reader but my wife is even more of one, and Karen’s taken care of us for years,” Skrah said. “I like mystery and crime books, and her recommendations have always been spot-on.”
Kropp’s own story began in Green Bay, Wis., where she grew up one of seven children of a railroad engineer and a homemaker. She remembers devouring Trixie Belden “girl detective” mysteries (“Nancy Drew was too prim and proper and Cherry Ames was a little old.”) She moved to California almost 30 years ago, and remains close to her two children, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
Her granddaughter Amanda Ines of Temple City started working summers at the store as a teen, later dropping her son Marz off to spend time with his great-grandmother. Both were on hand to say goodbye to the store.
Ines said she’s received many messages from people online, reminiscing about their high school days going into the store to buy books.
“People said they’d walk from the schools and head to the back and read for hours,” Ines said. “If you were quiet, she never shooed anyone away. I love how she was a staple of the community, that people would come in and she helped them.”
And even as her grandmother insists this is a happy ending, Ines said she hopes people remember to support small businesses and buy used things and recycle.
“She took a lot of pride in that,” she said.
Kropp spent her last official day at the Book Rack emptying drawers, ringing up last-minute sales and figuring out about 30,000 books have been donated and found new life in libraries in homes, jails, and homeless centers in the days before closing.
“People say if you want to stay poor, own a bookstore, but this was the best job because I could read anything I wanted,” Kropp said. “I like anything on a printed page.”
She will miss the short walk from the store to her Arcadia home, as well as her customers. Kropp has a small steel file cabinet stuffed with white index cards. On it, she had handwritten names, phone numbers, book genre preferences and credit balances. She is holding on to that, as well as three dreamcatchers that graced the store walls and a brass duck the former owner Pat Carlson used as a doorstop.
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“Everything else is being repurposed, I wanted to make sure of that,” she said.
For bibliophiles seeking a new haunt, Kropp recommends the Book Alley in Pasadena.
The bookseller herself is refusing to sit on a shelf: Kropp plans to move in with her sister Leslie in Albuquerque. The two hope to travel the country in an RV, visiting national parks and probably many bookstores along the way.
It will be a little like “Thelma and Louise, but hopefully without the driving off a cliff, and I’d be okay with Brad Pitt, or maybe Richard Gere, if I was, oh, 40 years younger?” Kropp said.
Whatever chapter comes next, she said she’s looking forward to “more learning, more life. This has been fun.”