The Millbrook, N.Y., bookstore, toy store, and art gallery, which opened on New Year’s Day 1988, is the latest indie to go on the market. In a for-sale notice posted on the Merritt Bookstore website, owner Scott Meyer says that he is retiring after more than 30 years in bookselling.
The announcement follows last year’s "Book Lovers for Scott" fundraiser by YA author Elizabeth Cody Kimmel to help Meyer and his wife, Alison, with medical bills from metastasized melanoma. “There are few better friends to authors and book lovers than Scott Meyer,” Kimmel wrote. The campaign she launched surpassed its $30,000 goal and raised more than $39,000.
The outpouring of support was no doubt because of Meyer’s own support for the community through the bookstore, which he began after selling books from his parents’ house four years earlier. The store takes its name from his father’s middle name, “Merritt.” “We operate by asking: “how will our actions help our community?,” Meyer states on the website.
Merritt’s community expanded to include nearby Red Hook, N.Y., where Meyer opened Volume II in 1999. The store closed in 2011. A short-lived Volume III opened in 2004 in the former site of Salmagundi Books in Cold Spring, N.Y. It closed in 2008.
Meyer declined a request to comment on the sale of the bookstore, which has been nominated three times for a PW Bookstore of the Year Award.
For more information, please contact Scott and Alison.
