Book Passage marks 50 years under the vision of its Strawberry founders

Strawberry residents Bill and Elaine Petrocelli, who own independent bookstore Book Passage, mark 50 years of being in the bookselling business this year. Pictured here at their Corte Madera store May 28, the Petrocellis have made Book Passage renowned for hosting or sponsoring book talks and lectures with speakers from a wide array of fields, from Belvedere author Isabel Allende to travel writer Rick Steves and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders to TV host Rachel Maddow. (Francisco Martinez / The Ark)

Elaine Petrocelli has always been a voracious reader.

Some 50 years ago, on a whim, she picked up and read a book on how to open a bookstore.

Petrocelli was looking to change careers and was inspired. The next morning, she told her husband, “This is it.”

“And then I went to my book club and they said, ‘Well, how are you going to do this? You have to write a business plan,’” Petrocelli recalls. “I said, ‘What’s a business plan?’”

Petrocelli wasn’t fazed. With her husband, Bill, she went on to open Book Passage, an independent bookstore that now has locations in San Francisco and Corte Madera and grew into one of the Bay Area’s most prominent literary landmarks.

On June 6, Petrocelli will reflect on her half-century in the bookselling industry in conversation with author and Stanford design-school educator Lisa Kay Solomon at the Corte Madera store. The conversation will also be streamed online.

That event kicks off wider 50th anniversary celebrations that will culminate with an event the weekend before Thanksgiving to mark the anniversary of when she first opened a bookstore in Larkspur that would later become Book Passage.

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