Politics & Prose

Bookstore aficionados may know of—or even may have visited—Kepler’s Books, a long-time fixture in the Bay Area and once a favorite haunt of book lovers from Stanford professors to Joan Baez.

Now Kepler’s is in a fight for survival—for the second time in a decade—and leading the charge to save it is Praveen Madan and his wife Christin Evans, co-owners of The Booksmith in San Francisco. As part of a project called Keplers2020, Madan and Evans last week brought together 78 representatives from across the book industry to imagine collectively what a community bookstore of the future—and Kepler’s specifically—might look like.