3 Photos
Black Cat Books on Main Street in Bridgehampton could almost double as a literary museum—a signed first edition of “The Wayward Bus” by John Steinbeck is displayed on a shelf, books from the 1800s are there for customers to flip through, and monographs bound in odd, textured materials lay on tables.
But come May, bibliophiles won’t have the luxury of wandering around the stacks and thumbing through the pages of its holdings. They’ll have to settle for scrolling through BlackCatBooks.com, because the shop is closing.
The downturn in the economy and the new ways people buy books—from websites such as Amazon.com, and in digital forms via the Kindle and other “e-book” devices—have really hurt Black Cat’s store business, explained husband and wife owners Michael Kinsey and Dawn Hedberg. The couple lives on Shelter Island and first opened Black Cat Books in Sag Harbor in 1997. They moved the shop to a bigger space in Bridgehampton last year.
Black Cat’s books are available for sale on a variety of online outlets and selling books to customers around the globe helped buoy the store during the long, deadly for business East End winters for years, the owners said. Not anymore.
“The economy definitely hurt retail sales,” said Ms. Hedberg. “We definitely felt it.”
Two other local bookstores have closed recently—Beach Reads in the Bridgehampton Commons and East End Books in East Hampton. BookHampton’s Amagansett store closed in March, and Mr. Kinsey and Ms. Hedberg said that they heard another bookstore in Sag Harbor might close soon.
As they prepare to close the shop, Ms. Hedberg and Mr. Kinsey are having a 50-percent-off sale, and Mr. Kinsey is working on adding a “buy online” feature to the company’s own website. He is also trying to figure out a way to build a “community” on the site because seeing regular customers in the shop and chatting with them is one of the things he and his wife said they will miss the most.
Mr. Kinsey and Ms. Hedberg shifted their shop’s focus toward rare and unique literary collectibles once shopping for used and new books on Amazon.com and other sites became popular. They also started to carry maps and lithographs—which collectors would want to see in person before purchasing online—and came to present books as art objects.
“The book becomes a work of art,” Ms. Hedberg said. “There’s no way to reproduce it online.”
But the book-as-art business started to fail in the current economy. Dropping $2,500 for a photographer’s monograph, for example, is a discretionary purchase that only the most avid book collector would consider during a recession, Mr. Kinsey explained.
Mr. Kinsey and his wife had been preparing for the close of their shop, which Ms. Hedberg calls a “labor of love,” for a while. They already have a warehouse stocked with 6,000 books on Shelter Island, near their home, and may end up one day making it a summertime “weekend destination.” Until then, Ms. Hedberg and Mr. Kinsey are looking forward to managing BlackCatBooks.com from their home.
They might even be able to spend more quality time together.
“After having a store for 13, 14 years, it’s been hard for us to be together,” Ms. Hedberg said. “It’s going to be nice to work from home.”
on Apr 16, 2010