Where she should have been all her life
Karen Emmerling opened Beach Books in 2005. Twenty years on, the Gilbert District still has a literary living room.
Cove Tales · January 24, 2026 · 3 min read
The Gilbert District is four blocks that survived the 1912 fire and then had to survive everything else. At 616 Broadway, Beach Books occupies the kind of room a visitor can feel before they read a spine: paper, wood, and the particular quiet of people who came in wet and intend to stay dry. Karen Emmerling opened it in November 2005. In November 2025 the city helped her throw a twentieth-birthday party, and the line at the cash wrap did not thin.
Journey here
Emmerling had already had other lives — television and advertising at KPTV in Portland, then faux finishes and marketing at Gearhart Ironwerks with her husband, the blacksmith John Emmerling — when she walked into Wordstock, now the Portland Book Festival, in the spring of 2005. “I felt like I had walked into the world I should have been in my whole life,” she later told Oregon ArtsWatch. She said it out loud on a delivery drive: when they retired, a bookstore might be fun. “It was like I just threw it out in the universe, and things started happening.” She googled how to open a bookstore. She found a 2,500-square-foot space off Broadway. They opened in four months. In 2012 a storefront on Broadway itself came free and nearly doubled the floor. She took it. The shop that had been “around the corner” put itself on the street that the rest of the town already used.
A normal day
The doors are ten to six, Monday through Saturday, and ten to four on Sunday. That is not a tourist schedule. It is a reader’s. Alexa Butler started here in high school in 2007 and never really left; she is the manager now, the social media, the person who kept the shop organized through a pandemic and a fire season when they carried advance-reader copies to evacuation shelters. The floor holds thousands of new books with a lean toward contemporary fiction, kids, and young adult. They special-order. They ship nationwide. They run a frequent-buyer card that credits you after twelve purchases, which is the kind of arithmetic that only works if people come back. Emmerling’s own shelves lean literary fiction and mystery. Staff picks sit where a visitor’s hand actually lands.
A customer moment
On a recent visit a regular asked Emmerling for a book and left with one she had not come in for. That is the work, and it is also what the Yelp reviews keep circling: Karen recommended a book; it was not the first time. The twentieth-anniversary night in 2025 made the same point at volume. “It was so much better than we even hoped,” Emmerling said afterward. “The lines at the checkout were long.” Butler put it in plainer downtown language: “We received a grant from the city and we partied.” Jane Mount painted stacks of the shop’s bestseller from each year. Authors filled the room. The city grant was not decoration. It was the town deciding that a bookstore on Broadway is infrastructure.
What visitors should know
This is not the Turnaround. Ann Branson, who works the floor, has said the Gilbert District is “a central location, but it’s not as crowded or overwhelming as the area at the Turnaround can be.” Come for a book, not a magnet. If they do not have it, they will order it. If you are only in town for a weekend, the website is open when the door is not. Take your dripping coat off before you lean on a table. And if you have a child, start in kids. The rest of the shop will wait.
I felt like I had walked into the world I should have been in my whole life.
