The Morris Book Shop, a Chevy Chase literary and cultural hub for five years, is for sale and may disappear entirely if a new owner doesn’t emerge soon.
Owner Wyn Morris said the surprise announcement, first reported by Tom Eblen in the Lexington Herald-Leader, was spurred by the timing of his lease on the space on the 800 block of East High Street.
“As far as the ‘why now?’ part of it, ... I had decision of whether I was going to renew for another five years or do something else,” Morris said. “I’ve sort of poked around confidentially looking for somebody but wasn’t really having much luck. That is why, after talking with staff, we decided to go public with it and say, ‘Hey, who wants to buy a bookstore?’ “
Morris praised his landlord, The Gibson Co., and said the company is allowing him to rent month-to-month for an unspecified amount of time in order to vet would-be buyers.
“They very much would like to see the bookstore continue in one form or the other, so they’re really being the best landlords in the world,” Morris said. “So we have some time to figure it out.”
Morris, a fixture in Lexington’s tight-knit publishing circles, opened The Morris Book Shop eight years ago at its original location on Southland Drive before moving to High Street five years ago.
Morris said despite support from the local community and beyond, running a bookstore is still a tough business.
“My job for the last eight years was to pretend that everything’s great,” he deadpanned. “It’s the book business, it is 2016. It has always been, and perhaps now more than ever, a fairly brutal way to try and make a living.”
Still, Morris said he his confident that new owners will take over and continue on with the store, which has about 20,000 titles in slightly more than 3,000 square feet of space.
“I really think that an interested buyer will step forward,” he said. “And while I will miss my day-to-day involvement with the shop, I feel like it’s way beyond me at this point and that somebody with some fresh ideas can really take it where it needs to go and continue on.”
Morris said he and his financial advisers are still working out a sale price. As his own plans, Morris said he hasn’t had a chance to figure that out yet.
“I’m going to worry about that after I put this thing to bed,” he said.