On a busy block of North Figueroa Street in the burgeoning Highland Park neighborhood of northeast Los Angeles—amid vintage clothing shops, cafés, and restaurants—is a new bookstore that by all outward appearances is like any other bastion of literary commerce. But the shop, which opened this past November and is the brainchild of two local independent publishers, Tyson Cornell of Rare Bird and Chris Heiser of Unnamed Press, boasts a unique business model. The North Figueroa Bookshop has forged a partnership with two larger publisher sponsors: Grove Atlantic and MCD Books, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux—which is itself a division of Macmillan, owned by the German media company Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
