One of Gainesville’s oldest bookstores will be writing its final chapter this semester.
Goerings Book Store, 1717 NW First Ave., will close after 38 years of business.
“At this point in time, Gainesville just isn’t friendly to bookstores,” said Thomas Rider, one of the store’s co-owners. “It’s disappointing.”
Rider pointed to the recession, the store’s location and competition from online shopping and chain bookstores as key factors that led to the store’s decline.
Although the chain bookstores have experienced rough financial patches, they have enjoyed the backing of publishers, according to Rider.
The same backing wasn’t extended to Goerings, Rider said.
“(The other bookstores) were deemed too big to fail,” he said. “They got another Christmas.”
The store was originally located at University Avenue and 13th Street, where it was briefly a Little Professor Book Center franchise owned and operated by Harvey and Viola Goering.
Originally, Goerings had two separate operations: one for textbooks, another for trade store operations.
However, the trade store folded due to mounting pressure from competing bookstores, and the store merged both operations into its current location behind St. Augustine’s Catholic Church.
The store announced roughly six weeks ago they would not be providing textbooks for the upcoming semester.
“There are a lot of folks who preferred us because we were less expensive and more dependable than the other bookstores,” Rider said.
The store’s lasting legacy, Rider said, will be the number of years the store has remained open and its ability to provide an important literary niche for the Gainesville community.
“If you add up all the years that we (book-sellers and past and present staff) have worked, you’re looking at 280 years of book-selling; that’s a lot of experience,” Rider said. ”New student bodies will come and go, and fewer of them will remember us. It will take longer for the townspeople to forget us.”
The store will likely close by March 1, although no official date has been set, Rider said. There are no plans to open a new store at a different location.
