One week into a going out of business sale for 35-year-old Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, N.Y., the store’s outreach coordinator, Bob Proehl, may have found a way to put on the brakes. Yesterday he posted a letter on the store’s Facebook page and Web site asking for the community to buy shares in the store.
“The fact of it is,” he wrote, “the market will not support a local independent bookstore in a town the size of Ithaca. It simply won’t. . . . But where is it written that the market dictates everything that goes on in our community?”
In order to raise $200,000 for the store, Proehl is asking 796 additional people to invest $250. He’s already made a commitment to take four shares, or to pay $1,000. While the response has been good enough for the store to track what’s being sold during the sale with an eye to restocking, Proehl told PW, “no one’s quite trawling through the summer catalogs yet. We’ve pulled them out of the recycling bin.”
For more information, contact Proehl at bobproehl@gmail.com.
