Conway bookstore closes shop

CONWAY — This central Arkansas city is home to three colleges, two prestigious literary publications and the Arkansas Shakespeare Festival. But now it’s missing something.

Last week, That Bookstore at Mountebanq Place - a small independent shop complete with a resident cat, visiting authors, a cafe and rocking chairs - closed, leaving the town’s more than 55,000 residents without a traditional bookstore.

The store closed Wednesday, five months short of its ninth anniversary, after struggling to attract customers for the past few years.

“It’s not that we can’t pay our bills, but we don’t have the freedom to do anything else,” bookstore owner Maryalice Hurst said. “We’re not having fun anymore.”

Conway still has some used bookstores and a Christian bookstore, as well as a Hastings chain store that sells videos, music, magazines, books, electronics and even toys.

And come fall, Barnes & Noble plans to open a 5,000-square-foot Village Bookstore at Hendrix Village. It will serve Hendrix College students’ textbook needs and offer other books for retail customers. But it will be much smaller than most Barnes & Noble stores, which average 25,000 square feet.

Hurst said she decided to close the day she learned of the Barnes & Noble plans.

As a child, she said, “I lived in 13 towns in just under 11 years. I’ve lived all over the world. The one thing that was constant to me was the library or the bookstore. ... I started [this store] to give children an opportunity to know the kind of bookstore I had.”

That Bookstore at Mountebanq Place opened in 2001 on Oak Street in a historic building that Hurst and her husband, Elwood Smith, restored in downtown Conway.

Catherine Christie of Damascus, one of Hurst’s regular and final customers, stopped by to help with a sidewalk sale Thursday.

“I think it’s valuable to have independent businesses in a small town or else we become sort of a Wal-Mart on the highway with a few Walgreens thrown in,” Christie said.

“A town with three colleges and supposedly educated professional people and a lot of children in town, I don’t see why a store like that had such troubles.”

Authors including novelist Debbie Macomber; former Arkansan Jo McDougall, a poet and recipient of the Porter Prize for Literature; the late Donald Harington; former Whitewater figure Susan Mc-Dougal; children’s writer Darcy Pattison; and Little Rock attorney Phillip McMath have visited Hurst’s store and left signatures on a countertop.

Macomber learned of the closing in Miss Kitty’s finale-mailed newsletter, drafted on the brindled cat’s behalf by “That Bookstore Lady,” as the newsletters always called Hurst.

“I do hope you’ll drop by to scratch my ears one more time,” the newsletter ended.

Macomber, whose novels sometimes feature a knitting shop, said independent bookstores are more than places to buy books.

“I equate them to what local yarn stores are,” she said. “They’re places where people meet, and your friendships are formed there. It’s a comforting home place. They’re important to the community, and it’s very sad to see so many of them closing their doors.”

Hurst and Smith “have worked tirelessly to promote Arkansas writers,” McDougall said in an e-mail.

“They believed in me early on, provided me a venue for readings, and continually promoted my work; I can’t thank them enough,” she wrote.

McMath called the store’s closing “a blow to all writers and serious readers in our state.”

“But it was a marvelous island surrounded by a sea of commercial and cultural indifference, and I am afraid that all of these small independent bookstores such as Maryalice’s will gradually be drowned by the mass consumption and mass communication that engulfs us everywhere,” he added.

For some author signings, such as McDougal’s, the turnout was huge with people lined up in the rain. But for others,there was barely an audience.

“We’ve had some fabulous authors, and nobody would come,” Hurst said as Miss Kitty extended a paw, then strolled atop a table of books.

Hurst’s store was not alone in its struggles.

The American Booksellers Association, a nonprofit trade association of independent bookstores, represents 1,350 companies with 1,700 storefront locations. Membership has dropped 10 percent in the past two years.

In January, Pine Bluff lost its only non-used or non-specialty bookstore, Waldenbooks, one of 200 of the chain stores that shut down that month.

Yet in Jonesboro, readers can shop at two large chains, a Barnes & Noble that opened in 2006 and an older Books-AMillion. There’s also a Hastings store.

Brad Lacy, president of the Conway Area Chamber of Commerce and Conway Development Corp., said he did not know why Jonesboro could support two such large bookstores when Conway couldn’t support the small That Bookstore.

Bookstores “may be a harder business model than it is for clothing or whatever else,” Lacy said. “You see some of that in places someone has carved a niche out. That may be just something unique to that community that they embrace, or it may be a personality.”

Further, any retailer is competing globally these days, Lacy said.

“The Internet puts manythings at your fingertips,” he said. “I would imagine that books are one of those things that are easily obtainable from some of the big-box stores that we didn’t have ... even 10 years ago.”

After moving to Conway with her husband in the late 1990s, Hurst visited Mary Gay Shipley’s That Bookstore in Blytheville, known for helping launch the careers of best-selling authors John Grisham and Rebecca Wells.

Hurst, a former advertising executive and professor at New York University, suggested that Shipley open a store in Conway. But according to Hurst, Shipley said, “‘I’m struggling with one. I cannot imagine what I’d do with two.’ I thought that was pretty silly at the time,” but not now.

Shipley, who opened her store in 1976, thinks that timing is one of the factors in her store’s survival.

“The thought of going into business now, I just don’t know how anybody could do it,” Shipley said. “It would take such a lot of money. ... They expect you to have everything ... to be as big as the big-box stores.”

Shipley and Hurst agreed that the Blytheville location has been a plus for Shipley’s store because, as Shipley put it, Blytheville is on “that Mississippi River author track.”

Blytheville is 77 miles from the Memphis airport, where authors arrive to begin book tours that also take them to Jackson, Miss., and the Southern writers’ mecca, Oxford, Miss.

“We used to take maps to the publishing companies. We’d say, ‘Here you are, you’re flying to Memphis. ... With one airport visit, you’ve gotten four visits in three different states’” by adding Blytheville, Shipley recalled.

Despite the closing, Hurst said, she’s glad she tried.

“We have met so many fascinating people because of this bookstore, people that we never would have met” otherwise, she said. “To be able to talk with them and to learn from them was a fabulous experience.”