Logansport rallies to save local bookstore

Company officials say a campaign to save the local Waldenbooks store from closing likely will fall short.

Mary Davis, corporate affairs manager for the store's parent company, The Borders Group, confirmed that by the end of Wednesday, company operators had told several callers they felt they had heard from everyone in Logansport. Still, she said, the calls will not change the store's fate.

"We certainly appreciate the passion and loyalty that our customers have shown," she said. "But this decision is final."

Cass County's lone bookstore is scheduled to close its doors for the last time on Jan. 24.

Davis said in a telephone interview on Thursday that the decision to close the Logansport Mall location and an undisclosed number of other stores was based on sales performance.

"We are taking a look on a store-by-store basis at whether these businesses are meeting our expectations," Davis said. "Those that aren't are being closed."

Patty Brown, program director for Reading Railroad, said store manager Jan Newton had been a real friend to the program aimed at instilling a love for reading in Cass County children. Brown said Newton was known to offer special discounts to the organization and sponsor activities such as author appearances and in-store book donation boxes.

"Book ownership is the next step to teaching the joy of reading," Brown said. "Losing Waldenbooks will be detrimental to the organization's efforts."

Davis said Waldenbooks averages 10 employees per store. She said The Borders Group would "work to place qualified individuals at other locations," but she said the store nearest to Logansport, located in the Tippecanoe Mall in Lafayette, was also closing.

The changes come as The Borders Group experiences its own financial woes. The company on Monday announced an 11.7 percent drop in holiday-period sales compared to last year; Ron Marshall replaced former chief executive officer George Jones the same day.

Joyce Gebhardt, executive director of the United Way, had been among those working to drum up local support for the store. She sent out an e-mail asking people to call the company's headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich., to protest the closing.

Such efforts have worked before.

Skip Kuker, president of the Logansport-Cass County Economic Development Foundation, recalled that in 2006 customers of Logansport's Jo-Ann Fabrics store bombarded the corporate phone line to protest the planned closing of the store in Cass Plaza. That store remains open today.

"In the age of information with blogs and Web sites, businesses don't want to get a black eye from the public," Kuker said. "People took it upon themselves to keep Jo-Ann's open."

So far, though, the effort to save Waldenbooks hasn't had the same result.