Working in the same bookstore seven years ago, Phyllis and Richard immediately clicked. Six months ago, they opened their own English-language bookshop: Berkeley Books of Paris.

Richard Toney stands post at the front desk behind an antique typewriter, occasionally checking the front door, but more often focused on a book. In the rear of the store, Phyllis Cohen nurses a cold with a cup of tea and a cigarette. Constantly in motion, she scans the shelves of poetry, checks the fiction section, then peers out the front windows.

On the surface, the two characters are an unlikely pair. Wearing jeans and sporting short dark hair, Phyllis, 36, is welcoming and social, an active member of the Anglophone community. The 73 year-old Richard is a self-described “loner” with frosty-white hair and dark-rimmed glasses. He is not eager to engage in small talk, and if he really has to, he delivers a rough, raspy speech, scattered with a few curses.

The two friends however have one thing in common: literature. Six months ago, they opened Berkeley Books of Paris, an English-language bookstore specialized in used books on rue Casimir-Delavigne in the 6th arrondissement. The store has been attracting customers with solid fiction and poetry sections, fine literary conversation, and what Phyllis calls playfully, “our charm and wit.”

The co-founders met in 1999 while working at the San Francisco Book Co. on rue Monsieur Le Prince, steps away from Berkeley Books. Phyllis was moonlighting as a bookseller there while on a foreign student exchange. Born in Chicago, she spent several years in New York, where she worked at the renowned St. Marks Books.

Richard (or “Tex”) had just moved back to Paris after a 33-year long absence. He had fallen in love with the city in 1954 when the military shipped him here for 10 months, after he had insulted an officer. In 1960, he returned to Paris with his wife and spent the next six years here working on short stories and a novel. The couple then returned to the United States where they soon divorced. Leaving Paris was “a bad mistake,” he remembers.

To make ends meet, Richard did all kinds of jobs: he worked in the sawmill, sold cars, worked for the government in Alaska… “I got fired from just about every job I ever had,” he says with a proud smile.

In 1974, he found his calling at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, his hometown. After nine years there spent perfecting his métier, he left to focus on his two other passions, traveling and writing. Finally, after a three-year journalism stint at the Washington Post, Richard returned to the city he most loved.

At the San Francisco Book Co. Phyllis and Tex immediately clicked. The pair commented on France’s “culture of books, ” astonished by the number of people carrying books around in the Métro and on the street, and by how many people still stroll into bookshops to discover authors instead of ordering bestsellers online.

But after nine months, Phyllis had to return to the United States to obtain her ancient philosophy and literature degree. A year later though, she bought a one-way ticket to Paris and got her job back at the shop, where Richard was still working.

In 2003, Phyllis received a job offer from the United Nations International Tribunal in The Hague. Although she found the tribunal work fascinating, the tug to be back in a bookstore was just too strong. Phyllis was pondering opening one in Holland, when Phil Wood, the co-founder of San Francisco Books, called to mention that a space was opening up around the corner from the old shop. Without hesitation she packed her bags. (Wood left San Francisco Books and became a co-founder and financier of Berkeley Books.)

Not surprisingly, Richard’s and Phyllis’s approaches to book selling differ: Richard doesn’t let his personal preferences get in the way and lives by the credo, “a good book in the book business is a book that sell,” while Phyllis selects books using mostly personal taste.

On the floor, an unorganized pile of tattered romance novels, self help books and policiers rest under a “free to a good home” sign. Donated to the store, unsaleable castoffs are treated like an orphaned litter of kittens here. That’s because Phyllis and Richard agree on the value of used books. Phyllis loves seeing customers find the elusive out-of-print book they’ve spent 20 years searching for. “With new books, you might as well sell cars, or donuts: you order them, you get them, you sell them and return them,” Richard explains. “With used books, somebody brings in used books to sell you and you don’t know what the hell you’re gonna find. It’s just much more exiting.”

So far, the young store has received a good mix of customers, and while both know that no one goes into the book business to make a fortune, they just hope that the store makes enough money to feed their insatiable reading habits and allow them to go on living in Paris. Phyllis imagines herself spending the rest of her days in the French capital and so does Richard: “When I lived here in the 1960’s, I made a mistake by leaving. I won’t make it again.”

Berkeley Books of Paris, 8 rue Casimir Delavigne, Paris 6. M°Odéon. 01 46 34 85 73. www.berkeleybooksofparis.com