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| Maple Street Children's Book Shop's sign. Photo: Flickr user Infrogmation . |
After 34 years in business, New Orleans’s Maple Street Children’s Book Shop is closing. Cindy Dike, who has owned the store since 1988, made the decision after “running out of cash and credit.”
The factors that contributed to the store’s demise form a kind of perfect storm. Trouble started with Hurricane Katrina. The storm forced many of the middle-class families out of New Orleans. “Customers with young children moved on to places where they felt more secure,” Dike says, “and that population hasn’t bounced back. My customers grow older and graduate to buying books next door [at the Maple Street Book Shop]. They can keep a customer for the rest of their life. My store, I need my customers to replenish.”
The reduction in the population of children in the city also hit Dike’s school sales hard. “Where previously a school would order 150 titles of a new book,” she says, “that number gone down to 50 or 60.”
The final blow to the store’s sales came with the opening last November of a new Borders superstore on nearby Charles Avenue. “I just saw my sales take a dive—November and December were terrible—and I can’t attribute it to anything else,” says Dike. “I guess people are changing the way they shop. My customers tell me the Borders store is all about electronics [it is one of Border’s new, highly touted ‘concept’ stores] but it doesn’t matter. I don’t do Facebook, I don’t do Twitter. Maybe I should have.”
Thinking back, Dike says two decades as a children’s bookseller has had numerous highlights, but none more so than seeing the excitement children had over buying a new Harry Potter book—“kids didn’t want the book in a bag, they’d just sit on the stoop and start reading it”—and the time the store was featured in a 1992 TV commercial for Visa credit cards. That ad starred the late, legendary New Orleans storyteller, children’s book author and teacher Coleen Salley.
Still, the closing of the store is not all bad news for Dike. She is being hired by Donna Allen, the owner of neighboring Maple Street Book Shop, to open and run a new children’s section for that store. What’s more, Dike won’t even have to move, as Maple Street Book Shop is taking over the lease for the building where Maple Street Children’s Book Shop currently resides, and is moving its stock into this larger space. The current Maple Street Book Shop will be transformed into a used bookstore.
“We’re bigger and we have a bathroom for customers,” says Dike, by way of explanation.
