Carla Cohen, the founder of Washington DC’s Politics and Prose Bookstore, has passed away.

Cohen (pictured, via) opened the bookstore in 1984. The bookstore site has this tribute: “Cohen’s entire background was anti-business so it was amusing to her family and all who knew her that Cohen decided to start a bookstore.  It was, however, just like the contrarian character she had inherited that she chose a part of retail then being nationalized.  It was a time at which small, independent bookstores were beginning to perish in large numbers.”

Add your tributes to the bookseller at this link.

Here’s more from the Washington Post‘s obituary: “Mrs. Cohen was a former urban planner who conceived of Politics and Prose as a salon where Washington readers and writers could gather to challenge each other in discussion about the big ideas of the day — a place that would reach beyond customers’ pocketbooks and become part of their lives. That concept proved wildly successful.” (Via Sarah Weinman)