The Final Chapter In a Washington Story

The closing of Olsson's Books and Records, one of Washington's few remaining independent bookstores, is the final chapter for another institution of the kind that made Washington Washington.

You'll know exactly what I mean if you remember when downtown was Hecht's, Woodies and Kann's; when subway sandwiches came from Miles Long or Eddie Leonard's, and 45s from Record City or the Soul Shack; and it cost a quarter to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons at long-vanished neighborhood theaters such as the Atlas or the Sylvan.

But John Olsson's announcement last week that his five-store chain was closing and that the firm would ask a federal court to change its bankruptcy status to allow it to liquidate its assets has more personal meaning for me.

I was one of the first three employees when John opened his first store -- Record and Tape, Ltd. -- at 19th and L Streets NW in 1972. I'd flunked out of Haverford College the year before and was living in my girlfriend's dorm room at Bryn Mawr, trying to figure out what I was going to do that summer when school was out and she went home. I'm sure I would have figured something out, but I didn't have to -- John wrote asking me to come back to Washington to work for him.

John, Jeff Searle, John Matthews and I spent the summer building counters and record bins and shelves in the empty shell of the store, which opened -- if memory serves correctly -- late that summer or early fall. The next summer, the woman who ran the barbershop two doors up on 19th Street stopped by to tell John she was retiring, and John took over the space for a store he called The Book Annex.

A few years later, after he'd changed the name to Olsson's Books and Records, John had nine stores in the Washington area. I was long gone by then, having left a year or so after The Book Annex opened to begin my career in journalism as a copy boy at this newspaper. But the Olsson's tradition continued in my family. Working at Record and Tape helped me pay tuition at Federal City College when I decided to go back to school. Working at Olsson's helped one of my siblings pay for graduate school and another save up for tuition when she took a semester off from college.

It's worth remembering, as we mourn the passing of these stores, that Olsson's wasn't just an important part of Washington's cultural and intellectual life. In that long-ago time before Google and Wikipedia, it was (like Terri Merz and Robin Diener's "literary book store," Chapters, and Hodari Abdul-Ali's Pyramid Books) a pleasant affirmation that books, and reading, really do matter.

But Olsson's also enriched Washington's cultural life by supporting scores of poets, writers, dancers and musicians who worked the floor or ran the cash registers. Like its predecessor, Bob Bialek's Discount Books and Records -- where John managed the record department and I worked as a stock clerk the summer after my first year at Haverford College -- it was a haven for artists and the unconventional.

To be sure, many of those who worked there probably talked more about writing poetry or fiction than actually doing either. But the benefit for customers who didn't know what they wanted were salesmen and women who actually read and listened to -- and cared about -- the books and music they sold.

In all the years that I knew John, I'm not sure I ever thanked him, not just for the opportunities he gave me, but for what Olsson's meant. I'm doing that now. Washington won't be the same without his stores.

-- David Nicholson

Vienna