For Children's Bookstore, an Unhappy End

They weren't far off.

'A Magical Place'

For years, A Likely Story had been owned by former teacher Marilyn Dugan. Five years ago, Dugan decided it was time to retire. Dinah Paul had been working at the shop and had fallen in love with it, so she and her husband decided to buy it.

Paul and her dog, Finnegan, were fixtures at the store, customers said. Coming into the shop was like walking into your grandmother's living room, they said, and Paul was tireless in organizing events and promoting the store. She appeared on local TV and radio programs with suggested reading lists. She wrote holiday gift lists and book reviews for local newspapers. She organized "Just Me and My Dad" story times on Saturdays. Her crowning achievement, in addition to the Pannell Award, however, may have come in the summer when she persuaded all of King Street to transform itself into Diagon Alley and hosted an enormous Harry Potter bash when the seventh and final book came out.

"She was a real visionary," said Lorraine Keir, a friend and neighbor who sometimes worked at the shop. "It was a wonderful place for little kids. People felt comfortable coming. . . . Rainy days, snowy days, there was always such a crowd. It was a great place for moms to meet other moms." If children came into the store and read a book, Paul gave them one for free. "It was really a magical place."

Susan Newell and her five children were regular visitors to the store.

"It was the best children's bookstore I ever went to. It was just something you felt," she said. "You walked in the door and you felt very welcomed, whether you had a quiet child or a screaming child. And they were very focused on books. You felt they had handpicked the special books that they wanted to display. We loved the store and loved what they did, and they obviously loved their clientele. But obviously, we didn't do enough to support the bookstore, and I'm saddened by that."

Paul said that deciding to close the store was the hardest decision she has made. "People loved us, but they didn't equate loving us to buying from us," she said last week, standing in the kitchen of her Rosemont home, feeding 11-month-old daughter Sabrina. "When we finally looked at all the bills coming in and saw how it would never match the cash flow, that's when we decided to sell."

She and her husband made the decision to sell just about a week before they actually did, and they waited until Nov. 19 to tell their staff. It just didn't make sense to stay open through Christmas, normally a busy season, she said. "Cash was so tight that we wouldn't have been able to ramp up for the holidays. And our selection was already so thin," she said. "I didn't want to go down like that. So we decided to call it what it is and end it and not struggle through another month."

Paul said that although she could organize events in her sleep, running the business end was a struggle. When she and her husband, Joshua, bought the store, it was operating in the black. But they thought that with new energy, they would be able to increase the number of buyers and draw new families to the shop. That never happened, she said.

"We had the best six months in the store's history and the worst six months," she said. "And we never understood why. We could never figure out what that secret formula was."

For example, people loved story time, she said, but many never stayed to buy books. "In fact, books got damaged," she said. "So story time ended up costing us." And although thousands came to the Harry Potter event, she had bought only 300 copies, mainly because she had overstocked Harry Potter books in the past. "I never required people to buy from us to participate in our events," she said. "I don't know if that's me being naive and gullible, but I thought that by creating this magical place, people would come. And they didn't."

Little Room Left

Stephanie Landrum, senior vice president with the public-private Alexandria Economic Development Partnership, said someone from her office had stopped by the store Nov. 21 to see whether the group could help A Likely Story stay open.