Profile

Jim Drougas’s career started in the seventies at a High Times–owned shop called New Morning Bookstore. Decades later, he is still entrenched in the counterculture as owner of Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Books, whose name is less a political statement than a description of business philosophy: The independent store seeks to neither have oppressively high prices nor to try to put others out of business. The shop offers liberatingly low prices and a constantly changing inventory on its overloaded shelves. The Dalai Lama, John Lennon, Che Guevara, and “I Ching” make frequent appearances on book covers, and the children’s section, which has a solid assortment of Dr. Seuss, also has titles like “My Hippie Grandmother.” Old and contemporary classics by authors like Milton, Chaucer, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Alice Walker, Arundhati Roy, Allen Ginsberg, and Aldous Huxley are plentiful as well, and the store has browse-worthy collections of art, travel, poetry, Eastern and Western thought, science fiction, ethnic studies, comics, politics, health, and food books. — Laura Shin

Everything is discounted all the time, but the store regularly has additionally 33% off sales for specific titles.