From The Idaho Statesman:
For book lovers, the approaching end of Trip Taylor Booksellers was bad enough. Downtown Boise’s three bookstores would soon become two.
But as the news of Taylor’s going-out-of-business sale spread this month, a second of the three stores was being offered for sale with little fanfare. Its owners quietly braced to go out of business, too.
As potential buyers eyed their building, the couple who own Rainbow Books, a used bookstore at 1310 W. State St., faced the prospect that their shop could become a tattoo parlor.
“I steeled myself to the idea that the bookstore wasn’t going to go on after me,” said Laurie Deines, who co-owns the store and its building with her husband, Robb. “That was hard.”
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Then Bruce and Laura DeLaney came calling.
The DeLaneys own the third store, Rediscovered Books, at 180 N. 8th St. They offered to buy both the business and the building and to keep Rainbow Books going.
“That’s just so wonderful,” Deines said Wednesday, one day before the Deineses and the DeLaneys were scheduled to close the deal. The DeLaneys have been managing the store for the past two weeks. “I don’t have to dismantle the store or have a closing sale. I just had to give them the key.”
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The DeLaneys opened Rediscovered in 2006 in the Overland Park Shopping Center near Overland and Cole roads. He was a chemist who worked for Micron Technology, she an elementary-school music teacher in Boise and Meridian. “We thought there was a need in Boise for a classic indie bookstore,” Bruce DeLaney said. The couple moved the store Downtown in 2010.
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Rediscovered, meanwhile, seems to be thriving. It has 14 full- and part-time employees. Bruce DeLaney declined to disclose sales, though he said they have grown every year since the store moved Downtown.
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The DeLaneys have fostered a reading community. Bruce DeLaney said the store took part in 250 events last year in the store, at The Cabin literary center, in schools and elsewhere. The couple in 2015 expanded the bookstore into a neighboring space previously occupied by a clothing store.
When Rainbow went on the market, DeLaney said he and his wife thought its closing would be a shame, while its purchase would offer a chance for their own business to evolve.
“It’s been a kind of North End institution: People take their kids there. Boise High kids come over when ‘The Great Gatsby’ gets assigned,” DeLaney said. “It’s a wonderful, friendly little bookstore, like the kind that used to be all over the country.”
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Rainbow’s rescue comes amid tough times for bookstores all over the Treasure Valley. In 2016, Nampa lost The Book Exchange and Pearson’s Twice Sold Tales. Yesteryear Shoppe, also in Nampa, is in the process of closing.
Link to the rest at The Idaho Statesman