Lore Bookstore: Leimert Park’s Black-Owned Independent Bookstore Cultivating Community Through Black Art, Design, and the Written Word

Leimert Park has been called the Black Greenwich Village of Los Angeles. The neighborhood that filmmaker John Singleton named and generations of artists, musicians, poets, and community builders made real — the drum circle on Sundays, the monthly Art Walk on Degnan Boulevard, the Vision Theatre, the KAOS Network, Art + Practice — is the cultural heartbeat of Black Los Angeles. It is one of the few neighborhoods in the city where Black culture is not just present but central, not just tolerated but generated.

Lore Bookstore opened on Degnan Boulevard in 2025 and belongs here completely.

Founded by Dário Solari — who also owns Untitled, the beloved art and design bookshop in Echo Park — Lore was built in collaboration with Art + Practice, the Leimert Park nonprofit co-founded by artist Mark Bradford that has anchored the neighborhood’s connection between contemporary art and community for years. The partnership is not incidental. It tells you exactly what Lore is: a bookstore rooted in the cultural ecosystem of Leimert Park, not parachuted into it.

The inventory reflects the neighborhood’s DNA. About half of Lore’s selection focuses specifically on Black art and Black design — a depth of curatorial commitment that most bookstores never attempt. The rest spans books for all ages: children’s books, graphic novels, cookbooks, poetry, photography, and the kind of visually arresting, culturally rich titles that Solari has spent over a decade sourcing through Untitled. His background as an architect, photographer, and painter — shaped by an upbringing in Mozambique, South Africa, Portugal, and eventually California — brings a genuinely global eye to a bookstore with a very specific and intentional sense of place.

Lore describes itself as a space cultivating community through critical design philosophy. That is not marketing language. It is the operating principle. The store is designed to be a gathering space as much as a retail destination — a place where the community comes in, stays, discovers something, and connects with the culture that Leimert Park has been holding for decades. Literary events, deep dives, and programming make the calendar as important as the shelves.

Solari has said that his motivation for opening Untitled as a brick-and-mortar was a craving for community — the recognition that there is ‘an alchemy in human interactions that algorithms just can’t do.’ Lore is that same conviction applied to one of the most culturally significant Black neighborhoods in the country. In a city where gentrification is actively threatening the character of Leimert Park, a Black-owned bookstore deeply connected to the neighborhood’s art institutions and community practices is not just a business. It is an act of cultural preservation.

The bookstore of your childhood dreams, the TikTok caption said when Lore opened. That is closer to the truth than most things written about bookstores.

@loreleimertpark