If a new owner isn't found by Christmas Eve, Collected Works, Ottawa's largest indie bookstore, will close in January, co-owner Christopher Smith announced on the store's Facebook page. The asking price for the business is $1: "The catch: the new owner will need to assume all the store's current liabilities." Collected Works "needs a new owner with deep pockets and an action plan to make the bookstore viable," he wrote.
Smith, who is v-p of the Canadian Booksellers Association, noted that he and co-owner Craig Poile "took a gamble two and half years ago expanding the store to twice its original size to accommodate a wider range of events and diversify our inventory. It's a gamble that has not paid off. Rent and other overhead costs have more than doubled, but our sales have remained flat."
About $25,000 of the expansion cost was raised from customers, to whom the bookshop paid interest in store credit. "We took all of our capital and pumped it into shelving, new floors and electrical, and regrettably that left us with no money for inventory," Smith told the Ottawa Citizen. "That ultimately meant that we started to go into arrears with our suppliers, which meant that they wouldn't ship to us, which meant that we didn't have any books to sell, which meant that sales started to suffer. It's a vicious circle."
