The Final Chapter For Newtown’s Only Bookstore

By Kaaren Valenta

The owners of The Book Review announced this week that after ten years at Sand Hill Plaza, they are leaving Newtown and consolidating their local business into their three-year-old store in Southbury Green.

Scott Bell and his wife, Camilla Crist, sent letters this week to their regular customers, informing them of their intentions to close the Newtown store this summer after the stock and the fixtures have been sold. The reasons behind their decision are many, “some obvious and some not so obvious – both business and personal,” they said.

In an interview at their Newtown store this week, the couple said they made their decision based on the fact that the lease on the 3,900-square-foot store in Sand Hill Plaza is expiring this year.

“The economics of continued operation just doesn’t make sense,” Mr Bell said.

Former Eastern Airline flight attendants who met on the job and married, the couple opened their first bookstore in Brookfield in 1989 after a friend, who was a pilot, flew them to Alabama to see the bookstore he owned there.

“This was our first business,” Ms Crist said. “It was all bargain books. But we quickly realized that having just bargain books doesn’t work in a community, so we opened the store in Newtown. At the time there were hardly any bookstores in Connecticut. People were so excited when we opened, we could have opened anywhere and be successful.”

But in the years since then, book retailing has changed, they said.

 “Currently no other industry has undergone, in the past decade, the metamorphosis that has occurred in retailing and particularly book retailing,” they explained. “When The Book Review first opened its doors, the suburban superstore did not exist. The Waterbury-Danbury corridor is now home to three such entities, each in excess of 30,000 square feet.”

“What’s changed is the number of options,” Ms Crist said. “Books are now sold in grocery stores, wholesale clubs and discounters such as Wal-Mart and Kmart. People see books selling for less than we could even buy them for. It has changed their perception. People think everyone should have the lowest prices.”

Mr Bell agreed. “In essence, books have become a commodity. They are a perfect product to sell on the Internet, too, because they don’t have a shelf life, they aren’t perishable.”

When a storefront next to The Book Review in Sand Hill Plaza became available several years ago, the couple expanded their business into it, adding a bargain annex.

“It worked well,” Mr Bell said. “It was okay on a month-to-month basis, but the landlords wanted a lease. The availability of the product was uncertain so we didn’t want to commit to a five-year lease.”

When the developers of Southbury Green began to build, they approached the owners of The Book Review.

“They courted us,” Ms Crist said.  “We wound up with a great location.”

Opened in October 1997, the Southbury store is much larger.

“We wound up with almost 6,000 square feet for the price of 3,500,” Mr Bell said. “We’re between Starbucks and Lindt chocolates, and the center [anchored by Grand Union and Staples] is getting a Gap and Pier I.”

One unexpected consequence of opening the store in Southbury, however, was a drop in sales in Newtown.

“The Southbury store took a lot of the customers who had been coming to Newtown,” Ms Crist said.  “It’s only 15 minutes away, so we hope that all our customers will come to the new store now.”

The Southbury store has a restored fighter plane hanging from its 22-foot-high ceiling, and ample space to sell both the regular book selection and bargain books. The Newtown staff, two full-time employees and eight part-timers, has been offered jobs in the Southbury store, Ms Crist said.

“We’d like to keep them because we want to expand,” she said. “A trained staff is so important. A bookstore is a different kind of business. There are almost 100,000 new books every year. There’s a lot of information for employees to learn.”

Having well-trained management and staff allowed the couple to also spend time opening another new business, The Media Merchant, in the Berkshires outside Stockbridge, Mass., last spring.

“It’s a perfect location, a seasonal place, a huge tourist area,” Mr Bell said. “The location, an outlet park, gets 4,000 cars a day. The store has bargain books and best sellers. It’s also a multi-media store with music, software and video, all under one roof. It’s doing great.

“We will be emulating many of its characteristics in a reformatting of our Southbury store later this year. We will have the space to add the complimentary products we didn’t have the space for [in Newtown]. And we will be continuing the clubs and programs, as well as the customer relationships, in Southbury.”

“It’s been a good ten years,” Ms Crist said, reflecting on the years in Newtown. “We really learned the book business here. But times are changing. A lot of regional bookstore chains have gone out of business. Books are not only available for purchase over the Internet, they also can be downloaded and read on a computer screen.

“I’ll never like that. I love the tactile sense of a book, the smell of a book. But what to us is so basic, might be old-fashioned to our daughter who is ten years old. And when you think about it, [with computers] you wouldn’t have to cut down trees.”

Beginning on May 25, the Newtown store will have a 20 percent off sale on all inventory and certain fixtures and equipment.  The sale will continue until the merchandise is sold.