In today’s Chicago Trib Business section, Mugambi Mutegi reported on the closing of O’Gara & Wilson, a fine old Hyde Park institution that has served the local community as well as the University of Chicago faculty and students since the 1960s. Doug Wilson (who apprenticed with founder Joseph O’Gara and later became co-owner) and his staff are currently packing up 27,000 books into 900 brown paper shopping bags, filling each with 35 books in the same genre. His plan is to relocate to Chesterton, Indiana where he hopes to establish viable used book business, looking to the town’s May-October European Market as a stimulus. The article also reported on the general decline of smaller specialty book shops faced with the impact of eBooks, large bookstore chains, and Amazon.
Barbara L.