The idea had been with Craig Florence since the late 1990s, when he arrived in Paris from wandering North Africa and George Whitman took him in at Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language bookshop on the Left Bank. Craig ended up living in that bookshop on and off for about a year and a half. He opened Mother Foucault's in Portland in 2010, once a little spare time after the birth of his son Carmelo gave him the chance to finally try it. The first storefront was a small space on Morrison Street. Today, two blocks over, the shop occupies a storefront in the Nathaniel West Building at 715 SE Grand Avenue, a Portland Historic Landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The shop is, by Craig's own measure, probably the best French bookshop on the West Coast, one of the best Spanish-language bookshops, and a major German bookshop too, with a decent range in Italian. More unusual for a Portland bookstore: a real Czech-language section as well. It is overwhelmingly used books, and the choosing is not an algorithm. "It's curated. It's human, you know," Craig says. The strengths are philosophy, poetry, and literary fiction, solid runs in Renaissance history, geographic history, theater, and film, and a Latin and Greek classics section, much of it genuinely rare, that Craig considers one of the shop's best. What's deliberately thin on the shelves is whatever you can already find anywhere else. As Craig puts it, this is "a shop that's designed for serious readers." The shop's name carries its own bit of philosophy too — read the story behind it.

There is no wifi. Bring a laptop looking for an outlet and you'll be told, kindly, that the rest of the world has wifi. What you'll find instead is a room that looks like exactly what it is: a human-scale effort, Craig at the center of it raising a family in between, and around him a loose circle of people who love this place enough to keep showing up, booking readings, keeping the calendar, minding the register on a Saturday.

Nobody walks in here already knowing what they'll leave with. That's the pleasure of it: you browse alongside strangers doing the same slow, quiet search, and every so often a book finds you instead of the other way around. It's the kind of discovery no algorithm can hand you, and no other room in Portland quite recreates.

Craig's advice for a first visit is simple. "Come here looking for a book."