Saturday, February 12, 2011

Davids Supplant Goliaths

Critic Sarah Weinman, now a big honcho at the subscription-only Web site Publishers Marketplace, offers this terrific news:
At least two bookstores will open in spaces that formerly housed mall-based chain bookstores. Wakefield Books in Wakefield, R.I., will open tomorrow in a space once occupied by Waldenbooks, which closed its doors last month. The new store is a joint venture of Wakefield Mall owner Jeff Levy, David Didriksen, owner of Willow Books, and Susan Novotny, who owns stores in Albany and Troy, N.Y., and is staffed with former Waldenbooks employees. In addition, Montpelier, VT-based new and used store Rivendell Books will open a second location in the Berlin Mall, in space that had been occupied by a Waldenbooks that closed a year ago. And Shelf Awareness also reports that Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, N.D., is seeking a new bookstore to replace a closed Walden and a closed Dalton, which had combined revenues of more than $2 million.
For those of us with serious bookstore habits, this is a welcome portent.

1 comment:

Dan Fleming said...

As a former Dalton employee, I'm very pleased to hear this. In Bangor ME, the Dalton is gone, the Borders is in trouble, yet the locally owned bookstores continue to do well. If only one of them could afford the outrageous mall rent and get more traffic. Malls NEED bookstores, if only to keep the masses semi-literate.