New feminist bookstore in Temescal already has an online following with celebrity fans

In August 2021, Berkeley resident Jessica Ferri was walking around her neighborhood when she spotted a pile of used books on the sidewalk.

Presuming they had been dropped off by someone cleaning out their home, Ferri picked up one of the books—“The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender” by Nancy Chodorow—and decided on a whim to sell it on Etsy.

“Everything was online,” she said, “and I thought, ‘I’ll just try this. It’s low-risk.’”

At the time, she was awaiting the publication of her second book, “Silent Cities San Francisco: Hidden Histories of the Region’s Cemeteries,” a companion to her book about New York’s cemeteries. She was also a critic for the Los Angeles Times, not to mention a part-time teacher at a private middle and high school in Berkeley. Selling vintage books on Etsy, Ferri said, was intended to be a casual “side hustle.”

This weekend, the hustle officially moves into its brick-and-mortar home in Temescal Alley. From that pile in the street, Ferri over the past three years has built a thriving and beloved “women-driven” bookselling business, Womb House Books, first a virtual store and now a physical one, opening at 10 a.m. Saturday.

Ferri describes her bookstore as a “highly, highly curated selection of inclusive and feminist books.” In addition to featuring notable authors and poets such as bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, and Shirley Jackson, the bookstore highlights writers who aren’t as widely recognized like Jamaica Kincaid, Vita Sackville-West, and Chris Kraus.

“Women’s writing is the most important writing to me personally,” Ferri said. “To me, feminism is not just about women—it’s about living with the belief that all people deserve love and safety. It’s about being an abolitionist, anti-racist, and anti-war. That’s what feminism means to me.”

The shop also offers works that are not necessarily by or about women but cover topics like racism, relationships, oppression, and identity—a diverse selection sourced mainly from the intellectual bounty of Berkeley and its surroundings, every book united by Ferri’s unique taste.

“Each one has been chosen with a lot of love and care for the reader,” said Ferri, who will continue running her shop on Etsy.

A ‘safe, protective, and generative space’

The name was a happy coincidence. After moving from New York to San Francisco and living in a Financial District apartment for roughly five months, Ferri, her husband, and their 2-year-old son moved to a house in Berkeley in 2021. Their landlord said that the previous homeowner, who lived there for 40 years, had written an essay about the house, which was built into the side of a hill, as if it were, as Ferri put it, “holding you in an embrace.” The essay described the house as a “safe, protective, and generative space,” Ferri said: The Womb House.

When it came time to name her online bookshop on Etsy, she thought about that essay. “It was perfect,” she said.

And so an expert on cemeteries became the proprietor of Womb House Books. 

Word spread quickly. Actress Emma Roberts—known for her roles in “American Horror Story,” “We’re the Millers,” “Aquamarine,” and other movies and TV shows—promoted Womb House Books through her and her best friend Karah Preiss’ book club Belletrist and even mentioned it in an Architectural Digest interview two months ago. (Roberts, Preiss, and Ferri hop on a monthly call to pick out books for Belletrist.) Stephanie Danler—author of “Sweetbitter,” which was adapted as a TV series in 2018—posted about Womb House Books on her Instagram.

By early 2022, Ferri went from selling three books a week to over 30 books a week. Since launching online, Womb House Books has completed nearly 5,000 sales on Etsy and currently boasts more than 200 listings. Behind the scenes, Ferri does everything herself, from finding the books (mostly at public library book sales), taking photos of them (always positioned just so on a patterned rug), posting them online, and shipping them out. She posts six new listings daily.

As a book critic, Ferri interviewed authors throughout the pandemic who told her how frustrated they felt with the lack of engagement with readers after publishing a book. In hopes of bridging that gap between writers and readers, Ferri began selling new books in addition to vintage books on her Etsy shop, but “it just wasn’t as dynamic as having a [physical] shop,” she said.

People were itching for a brick-and-mortar space, with Ferri’s customers frequently asking her on Instagram and Etsy when she would open a physical store. In February, one of Ferri’s friends told her about a vacant commercial space in Temescal Alley. Three months later, Ferri signed the lease.

Located in a roughly 800-square-foot space adjacent to Curbside Creamery, the bookstore carries hundreds of new and vintage works—including children’s books by women and people of color—and dozens of baseball caps with female authors’ names (think Didion, Ernaux, Dickinson, Cixous, and Plath).

Since the bookstore’s “soft opening” about three weeks ago, many residents have popped in to check out the space and purchase a book.

“Even with the windows taped up and the door shut … all the copies I had of ‘Pure Colour’ by Sheila Heti were already sold out, and we weren’t even open,” she said. “I think it just shows that people are ready to read and buy books.”

The song of books

Born and raised in Georgia, Ferri was passionate about books and music. For a time, the latter won out. She attended Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music initially as a voice major, hoping to one day become a professional opera singer.

“I always loved singing,” Ferri said, “but the whole time I was doing that, I really missed being around books and literary culture.”

After switching to an English major and graduating from college, she moved to New York to become an editorial assistant at a publishing company, but quickly realized she didn’t want to be an editor. In a “last-ditch attempt at professional singing,” she said, she returned to school and obtained a master’s of music in voice performance from Brooklyn College.

Several auditions later, Ferri realized that if she were to pursue a career in opera, she would likely have to move to Europe. At the time, she had just given birth to her son, which made moving across the world unrealistic. “For professional opera singers, there’s very little opportunity in the United States,” she said. “In Europe, the opera houses … are subsidized by the government, so there’s a lot more jobs.”

Instead, Ferri immersed herself in the literary world. She wrote the two books about cemeteries, taking the photographs as well, and has two more cemetery books that she aims to publish next year. She is also a book critic for the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post and has written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The New Yorker, and other prominent media outlets.

On top of her writing career, Ferri has also been an educator. From 2021 to January 2024, she taught English, creative writing, U.S. history, art history, and other subjects at a private school for middle and high school students in Berkeley. She also volunteered to teach English for one semester at San Quentin State Prison’s Mount Tamalpais College, the first liberal arts school specifically serving incarcerated students.

As much as the books themselves, Ferri is selling a certain sensibility. Of the titles on sale at Womb House, she recommends “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf, whom Ferri says everyone should read; “My Brother,” a heartwrenching memoir by Antiguan American author Jamaica Kincaid about her brother, who died of AIDS; and “Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker,” a touching biography by Marie Darrieussecq about the first known woman painter to paint nude self-portraits and her untimely death.

“I think—and I hope—being a critic lends a little bit of extra panache in terms of being a bookseller,” she said. “I hope that people will trust my recommendations or my expertise.”