Our Space
Pearl Street Books is housed in the historic J. Burgermeister Building, built in 1885. Before 323 Pearl Street was a bookstore,Arenz Shoe Company was open in the space from 1903 to 1992.
Today, the floor to ceiling wooden shelves that previously housed boxes of shoes (as shown in this La Crosse Tribune photo) are instead used to hold books.
Our History
Originally founded as the Wees-Kon-San bookstore by Jim Auler in 1998, Pearl Street Books moved to 323 Pearl Street in 2000 and earned a new name.
Beth Hartung, who has worked at the store since 2017, purchased the business from Auler in September of 2021. She is dedicated to providing a space for the community to gather, and to offering the experience of ‘windows and mirrors’ through literature.
Our AI Philosophy
Pearl Street Books stands firmly against AI media. In addition to staggering energy consumption concerns, many large language models (Chat GPT, Claude, etc.) have been trained on copyrighted books and materials without consent or compensation. We believe that writers and artists deserve to be recognized and platformed for their talents.
AI has no place in our industry, so here is our promise to you: we will never knowingly carry AI-generated materials (books, covers, or merchandise) in our store. Our posters will always be made by people. Any caption or copy you read on social media or our website will be written by a human, grammatical errors and all (sorry). If it is brought to our attention that something has slipped through the cracks and ended up in the store, we commit to removing it.
Creativity is what makes the human experience so special. With our limited time and resources, we promise we will continue to share real doors and windows into that experience - something we know we can do better if we disavow AI.