Harriett’s Bookshop owner Jeannine A. Cook purchases her Fishtown building

Harriett’s Bookshop’s current home is now its permanent home.

Jeannine A. Cook, the owner of Harriett’s, purchased the four-story building at 258 E. Girard Ave. from landlord Sang Casenta on Tuesday for $700,000, ensuring the future of the renowned bookshop.

“I’m still in shock,” Cook said Wednesday morning. “I’m so excited that people are excited. I hope it ignites a faith for people to go forward with their dreams. It’s really about putting one foot in front of the other.”

Cook rented the storefront from Casenta in 2019 with plans to use it as office space for her then-consulting business before deciding to sell books as a second stream of income. She opened Harriett’s Bookshop — in honor of the emancipator, abolitionist, and Civil War spy Harriet Tubman — in early 2020. It has since become one of the Philadelphia-area’s most-influential bookshops, a community meeting space, and a center for advocacy against anti-Blackness and for self-care.

Cook made a name for herself delivering books to customers on horseback during the pandemic and for traveling to Minneapolis and Louisville to donate books to community organizers protesting the police slayings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

After racists threatened her and other Black female business owners, she launched the Sisterhood Trolley Sit-In Trolley Tour, a tour of Black women-owned businesses in Philadelphia. She opened other bookshops, including Ida’s in Collingswood and Josephine’s in Paris. In May, Cook built a traveling library in honor of the first published Black American poet, Phillis Wheatley, as part of the Monument Lab Symposium.

“Everything that Jeannine does is wonderful and impacts not just the Philadelphia community, but people around the world,” said Marc Collazzo, executive director of the Fishtown Business Improvement District. “She’s the only one who does what she does and she chose Fishtown to bring that vision to life.”

Cook started to think about buying Harriett’s Bookshop two years ago when she saw so many Black-owned businesses closing when owners couldn’t keep up with rising rent. She felt helpless, she said, like she didn’t have control over her own destiny. “I couldn’t get this idea that I felt like a sharecropper out of my head,” Cook said. “I had a vision for something different, but I had no idea about how I was going to pull that off.”

Cook launched a GoFundMe campaign two years ago, raking in $75,000 during the first weekend. She ultimately raised $200,000 that she used to secure a down payment. Cook approached Casenta about a year ago, but Casenta — who had owned the building for 12 years — wasn’t ready to sell quite yet. Cook looked at other buildings in Fishtown and neighboring Kensington. Those deals fell through. Cook stayed positive, continuing to work closely with Casenta to solve plumbing issues, including a major flood during Black Friday weekend.

Casenta decided to sell the building in the spring, starting negotiations. “If anyone was going to buy this building from me, I wanted it to be her,” Casenta said. “There is always a lot of excitement in her shop.”

In addition to Harriett’s 500-square-foot first floor, the 250-square-foot basement, and garden in the back, the building has three apartments that she will maintain as rentals. Cook is in the midst of renovating Harriett’s and plans to open a café. There will be tables where people can read, write, and, of course, dream. The renovations, she said are happening slowly and steadily and that she hopes to unveil the first part of her progress during the Philadelphia Book Crawl, on Sept. 24.

“Up until now, Harriett’s has been a gallery space,” Cook said. “In this next iteration, she will feel more like a home.”