Giovanni's Room officially closing next month
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
The country's oldest LGBTQ bookstore will close its doors May 17.
J.D. Thomas via Flickr Creative Commons
After years of increasingly urgent warnings that business at Giovanni's Room would need to pick up for the Gayborhood bookstore to stay open, the country's oldest LGBTQ bookstore will be closing. Ed Hermance, the bookstore's owner, announced that he's been unable to find a buyer for the business and would be closing up shop May 17, according to the Philadelphia Gay News:
Hermance said he made the difficult decision to close the store several days ago. Since the beginning of the year, Hermance said he had lost between $10,000-$15,000 in keeping Giovanni's Room open.
He blamed retailers such as Amazon for the tough environment independent bookstores are currently facing.
Bookselling today is a series of bigger fish eating smaller fish — chains like Barnes and Noble and Borders swallowed most local bookstores, then were in turn devoured by Amazon. At the very bottom of the food chain are specialty local bookstores, like the LGBTQ ones that served such a vital function in the beginnings of the gay rights movement in cities across America.
As chain stores and Amazon have started carrying pretty much any book you could imagine, those LGBTQ bookstores have been closing right and left, particularly over the last five years or so. (Giovanni's Room inherited the title of "nation's oldest LGBT bookstore" when the East Village's Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop closed in 2009.)
What's worrying is remembering things like the 2009 glitch in Amazon's system, shortly after Oscar Wilde closed, in which thousands of books with gay themes, including ones by Gore Vidal and E.M. Forster, were classified as having adult themes and removed from the site's search results. That was an accident. But what if it hadn't been?
