Five months after emerging from bankruptcy, Joseph-Beth Booksellers announced Friday that it’s adding a fourth store. Joseph-Beth Booksellers will open by mid-November in a 20,000-square-foot retail space in the Crestview Hills Town Center in Crestview Hills, Kentucky, a Cincinnati, Ohio suburb. The space until recently was a Borders bookstore. The store will include an inventory of 60,000 titles, as well as gifts and sidelines. Like the other three Joseph-Beth stores, it will include a bistro. The Crestview Hills Joseph-Beth Booksellers will be staffed with 30 employees, some of them former Borders employees and managed by Craig Sherman, whose 24 years in retail including that as g.m. at Borders.
The other three Joseph-Beth stores are in Lexington, Kentucky, Cleveland, Ohio, and Cincinnati. The Cincinnati store, at the Rookwood Pavilion shopping center in Norwood, is about 15 miles away from Crestview Hills.
Joseph-Beth Booksellers, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, was acquired last April by Robert Langley, a Lexington-based real estate developer. In November 2010, the regional chain, which at the time included seven Joseph-Beth stores and two Davis-Kidd stores, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. After creditors rejected Joseph-Beth founder and previous owner Neil Van Uum’s reorganization plan, the remaining stores were put up to auction. Langley acquired three of the stores in an effort, he told PW in an article that appears in today's magazine, “to make sure Joseph-Beth thrived into the future.” Langley owns the Mall at Lexington Green, in which the 45,000-square-foot Joseph-Beth flagship store has been an anchor tenant since 1986. While still in negotiations to acquire the Crestview Hills Town Center, Langley told PW that “it’s in a very good location,” in an upscale mall housing more than 65 tenants.
