Photo from Google maps
Plenty people these days still love a quaint, independent bookstore. But plenty of those people just don't go to them anymore.
Some turn to ebooks or Amazon or the smattering of surviving Barnes & Noble stores. Some just don't read books.
With that in mind, it's sad to learn that Detroit's oldest bookstore, the Big Bookstore at 5911 Cass Avenue near Wayne State University, is planning to close its doors, writes John Carlisle of the Detroit Free Press in a charming feature story. An exact date hasn't been determined.
The owner, John King of the John King used bookstores -- he' also owns the big store on Lafayette Blvd. in downtown Detroit and one in Ferndale -- tells the Freep that he's got an offer for the Cass Avenue property.
Carlisle writes:
As the neighborhood gentrified over the last decade or so, the offers King was getting for the property kept escalating, and finally became impossible to ignore. A deal hasn’t yet been signed, but it’s coming soon. His announcement of the impending closing was fairly blunt in its explanation.
“The store, sadly, became an anachronism and deteriorated to an almost embarrassing state,” King said earlier this summer. He didn’t take out a newspaper ad or distribute flyers to announce it. Fittingly or ironically, he thought the best way to get the word out these days about the demise of an old-fashioned bookstore was to post the news on Instagram.
Carlisle reports that he Big Bookstore has "been a scruffy, underperforming little brother to the other two."
"You get to a point when you’re in hospice and you know you’re not getting out,” King tells Carlisle. “The bookstore is basically in hospice.”
The Big Bookstore has been around since the 1930s, in different locations near Wayne State but always with the same name, Carlisle writes. King bought the store in the late '70s and relocated it to its current location.
