Sunday’s NYT led its national coverage with the closing of Cody’s Books, one of the most famous independent booksellers in the San Francisco Bay Area. As portrayed by Jesse McKinley, the closing is being viewed by Berkleyans as a death knell for Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue micro-economy. But when the SF Chronicle reported on the closing back in May, Steve Rubenstein and Henry K. Lee emphasized the pummeling Cody’s took from megachains and online booksellers. They also pointed out that Cody’s has two other outposts, a small branch in Berkeley and a 22,000-square-foot store in San Francisco, which will remain open.
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books began liquidating its inventory Friday afternoon, one month after the store was offered up for sale. (As Frances Dinkelspiel reports, however, ACWLP co-owner Neal Sofman is staying in the bookselling game with a smaller store in the West Portal neighborhood.) And Tiffany Martini of the SF Examiner interviews Amanda Cotten about the closing of Valencia Street Books, also blamed on chain stores and overall economic woes. Another clue, though, might be found in the reason Cotten’s first bookstore closed three years ago: a change in consumer trends that “forced the bookseller to choose between selling what the people wanted or selling what she wanted.”