Bon Voyage! Harriett’s Bookshop’s Jeannine A. Cook sends 11 young scholars to Paris for Thanksgiving.

Eleven young adults are spending Thanksgiving week gazing at the Eiffel Tower, tooling through the galleries in the Louvre, and floating down the Seine, thanks to Harriett’s Bookshop owner Jeannine A. Cook.

Cook partnered with North Philly’s accelerated high school YESPhilly and the D.C.-based teen travel company Going Global with Barbara and raised more than $60,000 through GoFundMe for the students and chaperones to travel overseas. The jaunt will be many of the young adults’ first trip abroad.

“I’m sooo excited,” said 19-year-old Nymir Foster. Foster, dressed in a pithy cobalt blue tuxedo with skinny two-strand twists dangling past his eyes, was surrounded by family and friends who gathered at Harriett’s Bookshop Friday night to wish Foster and his cohorts a bon voyage. “I’ve always wanted to go to Paris,” Foster said. “I can’t wait to see the art and the fashion.”

Cook — who owns Harriett’s in Fishtown and Ida’s Bookshop in Collingswood — is respected throughout the book world for her artsy pop-up installations that pay homage to the legacy of Black women. She’s hosted two pop-ups in Paris named after the early-20th-century entertainer and expatriate Josephine Baker.

However, Cook, 40, did not travel to Paris until she was in her 30s. This trip is Cook’s way of giving Philadelphia students an opportunity she dreamed of when she was their age.

“This is another iteration of Josephine’s,” Cook said. “Instead of bringing books, I’m bringing these young people to Paris. I want them to see the road she travelled. I want them to see anything is possible.”

When Cook brought the idea to YESPhilly’s principal David Rivoire, he was unsure he could pull it off but excited about the potential. Cook made it happen, recruiting Going Global’s founder, Barbara Eubanks, to coordinate the experience. Cook collaborated with the school district to create an elective where students earned credits, applied for passports, and took classes in travel etiquette. They also wrote essays about why they should be chosen for the trip.

“I wrote about seeing the Eiffel Tower,” said Rashia Goosby,18, who will graduate from YESPhilly in January and plans to go to college in the spring. “I’ve only seen Paris in [Netflix’s] Emily in Paris. I want to see the places where Emily went.”

Hassan Cox received his high school diploma from YESPhilly on Nov. 1. He can’t wait to visit the art museums. “I’m stoked,” said Cox, 20, who wants to go to college for nursing or, perhaps, pick up a trade like fixing cell phones. “Nah, I can’t draw,” he said with a quick smile. “But art is really inspiring to me.”

The students and their chaperones will tour the City of Lights for seven days and stay in an Airbnb where they will will celebrate Thanksgiving — that falls on Cook’s birthday this year — as a group.

On Friday, the excited students and their families milled around Cook’s still-being-renovated bookshop. She purchased the building, Harriett’s home of four years, for $700,000 in August and is still in the midst of turning the 500-square-foot retail space into her dream book boutique. Partygoers sampled sweet and savory pastries served on a newly installed counter slated to be a coffee bar. They drank lavender Mami Wata punch, a nod to a fertility goddess and mermaid believed to live in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa.

Harriett’s walls were painted a rich navy adorned with floating bookshelves with popular new hardcovers like like Ta’Nehesi Coates’ The Message, Percival Everett’s James, and Krystal Marquis’ The Davenports: More Than This. A wall featuring photos of Diana Ross and the Supremes sits opposite the single-book bookshelves, a few feet away from a portrait of abolitionist, emancipator, and the bookshop’s namesake, Harriet Tubman.

“This work is part of the work of Harriet,” Cook said. “These passports we helped these young people get are like Freedom Papers, like their ancestors who were enslaved before them, these documents give them access to the rest of the world.”