It's official. Hilary Lowe and Michael Gustafson, who had been among the final three applicants for a "prime storefront" property in downtown Ann Arbor, Mich., have signed the lease and will soon open Literati Bookstore at 124 E. Washington Street.
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| photo: AnnArbor.com | |
"Our space is directly next door to Amadeus Restaurant and two doors down from our favorite happy hour spot Arbor Brewing Company," the co-owners wrote on their store blog. "We couldn't be more thrilled about the location! Washington Street is quickly becoming a hotspot for restaurants and businesses and we're happy to be adding to the vitality of the area."
They also said they "will have much more news in the upcoming days and weeks, and hopefully, we will be opening very soon, too. We have lots of work to do... but the biggest step is done!"
No small part of that work involves decisions about shelving and signage, which they have already begun to address: "When we started thinking about how we were going to shelve the store, we initially thought we’d use a mix of used and custom shelves. But then we heard that Borders No. 1 downtown Ann Arbor still had lots of shelving available. So we went and checked it out and decided, let's do this. We removed/disassembled more than 50 shelves....
"We'll try to give the new shelves some Literati personality and paint over that with chalkboard paint, making it easy to write in our sections. We're planning to accent the store in black and white so we can to keep in line with our logo design, hence our signage in the black/white of chalkboard. This was an idea passed along by Kate McCune, a Harper Collins rep, who suggested this after Parnassus Books in Nashville instituted chalkboard signage for their sections, making it easy to switch them up if need be."