Shakespeare & Company, seen on Wednesday afternoon, sells coffee and used books.
Shakespeare & Company cat Mary Tyler Moore hangs out in the coffee shop on Wednesday afternoon in Chehalis.
Mo Anderson, one of the owners of Shakespeare & Company, reads in her shop Wednesday afternoon in Chehalis.
On any given afternoon, Karen McSwain can be found lounging on a chair in Shakespeare & Company with a book and her cat Mary Tyler Moore somewhere nearby. She and co-owner Mo Anderson run the coffee shop and used bookstore in Chehalis seven days a week.
“It’s rare that there is a day that we don’t go shopping for books,” McSwain said. “Even if it’s just running through the thrift store, I’m always looking. We go to estate sales, and garage sales — any place people are selling books is where we find them.”
Shakespeare & Company is difficult to find. The large white house on the corner of NW Pacific Avenue and NW North Street in Chehalis has a sign out front — and another on the building that very accurately says “coffee & books” — but the building is still easy to miss if patrons don’t know what they are looking for.
“We have a lot of locals that come here regularly,” Anderson said. “As far as the general public, there’s not a lot of people that know we’re here. We have hit a small percentage of the people and they keep coming back.”
The shop, which opened in summer 2017, has already collected out-of-town customers who make it a point to stop in Chehalis. The owners said they have seen repeat customers from Seattle, Portland and San Francisco.
“We are slowly, incrementally growing, but always growing,” McSwain said. “The Square reader that we use does stats for us, which is something Mo and I would never do, so it’s really cool to get up in the morning and look at what the stats are. It compares it to previous weeks. So we have a steady growth, which is exactly what one would hope for in a small business.”
McSwain and Anderson hope to create a space that fosters locals’ creativity. Since it opened, Shakespeare & Company has hosted three poetry slams. A customer — who Karen described as “an avid poetry slam person (and) a great performer” — originally asked if she could hold poetry slams at Shakespeare & Company.
“I was like ‘sure, I don’t even know if it will work in this town, or if people will know what it is or come out for it,’” Karen said. “The first one was kind of slow, but magical because it was very safe. People could just do their kind of voice-shaking kind of poems and it was sweet. Then the second one we had a full house. It was packed in here.”
Fewer people attended the third poetry slam, and the events are on hold for the time being. The person who previously ran the poetry slams is a new mother, and began a new job recently. McSwain and Anderson, however, want to continue fostering a safe, creative space.
“I’m really hoping for more,” McSwain said. “I want more book groups to meet here. I would love to have writing groups meet here. There’s been a variety of very small, creative things that have happened here. … I am so open if people want to contact me to have a book group meet here, to start a writing group here, to have an art group meet here — anything creative.”
McSwain said she believes people are hungry for local, creative experiences.
“I want people to be able to feel like the space feels like home to them,” McSwain said.
