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Bookselling was and is for me a cultural and political expression, an expression of progressive change, of challenge to oppressive authority, of a search for a community of values which can act as an underpinning of a better world. The true profit in bookselling is the social profit; the bottom line, the measure of the impact of the bookshop on the community.

-A. David Schwartz
son of the founder and longtime bookseller

I never thought it would happen.

I read the publishing news and know it’s been a difficult time for book stores, especially independents. But I always believed my local independent, Milwaukee’s venerable 82-year-old Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, would somehow survive.

Alas, it is not to be. Schwartz Books is closing its doors forever on March 31.

These stores have been dear to me since I was old enough to buy my own books. Fond memories include browsing the used books at the Downer Avenue location, a pleasure made sweeter by the new independence afforded me by a driver’s license so I could come in from the suburbs and partake of Milwaukee’s East Side. My friends and I would first visit The Coffee Trader, another beloved but lost Milwaukee institution, though we didn’t even like coffee.

During college, I’d sometimes visit the Wisconsin Avenue location just to sit in one of the leather club chairs and browse through magazines and literary journals I’d never seen before on its extensive newsstand.

In adulthood, I spent many happy hours at the Brookfield location. Gift certificates–the paper kind, before the ubiquitous gift cards existed–were always on my gift list, and when I got them, I savored long evenings of wandering amid the shelves, randomly opening volumes, looking for the book whose first few sentences drew me in.

And I attended so many memorable author appearances: Jane Hamilton reading a short story that she’d written based on a friend’s experience and could therefore never publish. Writing acquaintances Shauna Singh Baldwin and Lauren Fox reading from their novels. Anne Lamott, cracking us up with a story about letting her son Sam sell his own autographs at a book signing for a quarter. And an especially fortuitous chance to hear Carol Shields read from The Stone Diaries the day her Pulitzer Prize was announced.

The letter announcing Schwartz’s closing is gracious and sad, and sums up the state of bookselling far better than I ever could. I hope you’ll read it, and visit your local independent bookseller soon.