History

Founded during the middle months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cicero & Co. Books and Letters is an independent online bookstore established by two university students in response to a world that had transformed to a shadow of itself. Recognizing the need for meaningful connections in growing isolation and uncertainty, we launched our store on Facebook with a careful selection of used novels by Woolf, Camus, Ishiguro, Modiano, Nabokov—our approach was simple: only the finest and most through-provoking literature and non-fiction.

What began as a modest project soon expanded to the import of new books from the United States and Britain. We now pride ourselves in harder-to-find titles from lesser-known publishers, including New Directions Publishing, New York Review Books, Archipelago Books, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Dalkey Archive Press, and others yet to be discovered. (To this day, we inaugurate our upload-seasons with the imprint of New Directions Publishing, as if searching for more hidden literary openings). 

For us, the act of buying a book is something more than a simple transaction. It has become a recognition of the familiar, of the promise of understanding through reading, even as it is offered through a screen, across distances that seem to widen by the day. Such is the spirit of our namesake's bibliophilia, si hortum in bibliotheca habes, nihil deerit.

“But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight.”

Sebald's The Rings of Saturn