After 67 years in business, one of Tyler’s last locally owned book stores, Fireside Books, has closed its doors.

James Leath, who started working at Fireside Books in 1988 and has owned it since 2011, was helping a few lingering customers with their discounted finds on Wednesday, a day after he officially closed the store at 110 E. Houston St.

Leath, 55, expected it would take days for him to pack up the estimated 15,000 books he had lining the shelves and said if people continued to come in offering him money while he was there, he would take it.

Leath knows that soon the only physical reminders of the long-time business will be tote bags bearing the familiar mantelpiece logo of the store scattered around town.

Fireside Books was started long before Leath was born.

Lena Dean opened it as a new book store in 1947 on Front Street by Tyler High School, and moved the business to Bergfeld Shopping Center in 1960.

Trudy Richardson bought the store in 1976, and Leath, who was born and raised in Tyler, joined the shop in 1988.

 

LOVE OF READING

“I never remember a time I couldn’t read,” Leath said.

He recalls getting an adult library card when he was 11 because he had read all of the kid’s books.

Leath likes to read a little bit of everything — fiction, biographies and a lot of history. “I like to read good stories about people,” he said.

He tries to read books of all kinds to try and keep up with what is out there, and he sold a little bit of everything at the store, he said.

“I’ve never been able to look at them (books) and go, ‘Ah, merchandise’ … I want to read that one and that one,” he said.

Leath, who worked as store manager for years, and Ms. Richardson transitioned the store to used books because of the growth of big book chains, and they also began selling books online in 1996, he said. They moved the business to its current location in 2000, and Leath took over after Richardson’s death in 2011.

When they were a new book store, they saw the same regular customers all of the time, but a used book store draws a different clientele, Leath said. At the end though, he saw a lot of the old customers who remembered shopping with Ms. Dean, come in one last time, he added.

 

MAKING CONNECTIONS

“The best thing is to put together a book and a person and have them say, ‘This is just what I was looking for,’” Leath said of why he loved selling books. “It’s making those connections.”

He said it is that personal contact with customers — the chance to talk about what they want to read and the stories that come out of that — he will miss the most about closing the store.

All of Leath’s five children have helped out at the business throughout the years, especially during inventory time.

“They’ve all grown up loving books, not that they had a choice,” he said.

Leath plans to continue selling used books online.

“I’ll always be doing something with books,” he said. “All of the wisdoms and culture of the world, as well as all that entertainment between covers is never going to go away.”

Leath attributed the closing of the physical store to a change in buying patterns with the rise in online buying and Tyler’s business center moving south.

“People still read, but the convenience of ordering by computer is so great, and we of course have been and will continue part of that,” he said, adding that his online business remains strong but walk-in traffic dropped below the tipping point.

“The sad thing in only shopping online is you miss the chance to browse and find the book you never knew you needed,” Leath said.

He has seen many authors rise and fall off the best-seller charts but said good storytelling will always sell. He also believes electronic versions will continue to share the stage with real books because each has their own place.

The big change in books will be in the continued trend of authors doing their own publishing and selling direct to their readers, and the decline of the big New York-based publishers, he said.

Leath plans to offer his books on such websites as Alibris & AbeBooks as part-time work while finding something in a more service-oriented line of work to directly help people.

“There are so many needs in this world that even a good book cannot fix,” he said.