Rewriting the Ending

The unfortunate demise and surprising rebirth of a very special business. Part 1 in a series.

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Death came swiftly to Kepler's Books & Magazines in Menlo Park, California--so swiftly that word of its closing sent the entire community into shock. Clark Kepler, son of the store's late founder, delivered the news to his employees at an early morning meeting on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. He said that he'd run out of money and ideas, leaving him no choice but to shut down the store less than four months after celebrating its 50th anniversary. The tears flowed as he talked about his sorrow over the decision and invited other people to talk about theirs. He handed out the last paychecks, saying that he would delay filing for bankruptcy to give people time to cash the checks before things got messy. When customers showed up that morning, they found a brief note from Kepler taped to the glass: "The decision to close our doors has been one of the most difficult in my life. As much as we love what we do and would like to continue another 50 years, we simply cannot. The economic downturn since 2001 has proven to be more than we can rebound from."

Within hours, the news had spread throughout the Bay Area. People started coming in groups of two and three to pay homage to a store that had been the embodiment of the area's history and culture. It was at Kepler's, after all, that Ken Kesey had hung out when he was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and it was there that Neal Cassady--the Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac's On the Road--was lolling about when Kesey recruited him to be the bus driver on the cross-country journey that Tom Wolfe immortalized in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Jerry Garcia had met the future members of the Grateful Dead at Kepler's. Joan Baez had also been a regular, and for a while Roy Kepler--Clark's father--had been her business manager.

In the following decades, Kepler's had changed along with the rest of the Valley, moving three times before landing in its present spot in 1989. Located in a shopping plaza on El Camino Real, in the heart of Menlo Park, the new store was big, 10,000 square feet, and carried 100,000 titles. Although it lacked the counterculture ambience of the original, it fit comfortably into the affluent, well-educated community that had sprung up in the area during the previous decade. Next door was a bistro, Café Borrone, that served as a meeting place for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, as well as a hangout for book lovers. Kepler's was still a community center, but it now offered book readings, author events, and children's activities instead of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

The store was such an integral part of Menlo Park that people assumed it would be there forever. Granted, some customers may have noticed that the inventory had started to seem a little thin, and at least a few employees were aware that budgets had been shrinking. The store's buyers knew that several publishers had put Kepler's on "hold," meaning it had exhausted its credit with them and wouldn't be able to get the books it wanted until it worked out terms for paying off its debt. But many bookstores find themselves in that situation during the summer. In any case, the signs of stress were invisible to most people in the community--until August 31.

All that day and the days that followed, people came to view the scene for themselves. Some left flowers. Others just stood there, stunned and bewildered, or outraged. Still others taped notes to the windows, or took photographs, or exchanged memories with one another. Someone put up huge pieces of paper on which visitors wrote messages expressing their sense of loss. Many were written by children. One person even left his phone number, saying that he'd stolen a book from Kepler's in 1975 and now wanted to pay for it.

"We're not religious people," says a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. "[Kepler's] is our church."

For a lot of people, the experience was profoundly disorienting. "Have you ever seen somebody after they've been in an automobile accident?" says Daniel Méndez, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who happened to be having breakfast with his wife at Café Borrone that morning. "Everybody was just walking around in a daze, or in tears. I've seen many businesses fail, but I've never seen any that touched the community like Kepler's did." A book lover and collector, Méndez biked to Kepler's almost every weekend, usually in the company of his daughters. They would have breakfast at Café Borrone, then go next door to browse, read, and shop. It was a ritual. "We're not religious people," Méndez says. "I tell my wife, 'This is our church."

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Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. The book was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2006. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome.

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