File photo / Laurie Schreiber
Sherman's Maine Coast Book Shops’ flagship store in Bar Harbor, seen at right, opened in 1886.
March 26, 2020
Crisis forces permanent closure of Sherman’s bookstore Camden location
Courtesy / Jeff Curtis
Sherman's Maine Coast Book Shops’ Camden location, seen here, will close permanently. The family-owned chain’s five other locations closed temporarily March 24.
The Camden location of Sherman's Maine Coast Book Shops closed permanently this week. And the other five locations of the family-owned business began a temporary closure March 24.
“The Camden store was a hard decision,” owner Jeff Curtis told Mainebiz. “Sherman’s is the kind of business that pays its employees pretty well, and pretty much all the money from sales that come in one week go out the next week in payroll and rent. So to close down for what we think is going to be three months, we just couldn’t open as the same company we were before.”
As for the other Sherman's stores, “we hope to be open again, perhaps in late spring/early summer,” Curtis wrote on the company’s Facebook page. “We will be contacting all our customers that have placed special orders, so we can do our best to fill these orders.”
Sherman’s flagship store opened in Bar Harbor in 1886, when founder Bill Sherman bought a printing press and established W.H. Sherman Printer & Stationer.
The printing operation eventually scaled back and the focus on books grew. Sherman’s daughters took over the business in the early 1900s, then sold it to Michael and Patricia Curtis in 1962. They diversified the stock to include wares such as office and art supplies.
Their son Jeff and his wife Audrey entered the business in 1989, opening Sherman's of Boothbay Harbor, then locations in Freeport in 1998, Camden in 2004 and Portland in 2014. In 2016, Sherman's bought the Maine Coast Book Shop in Damariscotta and rebranded the chain as Sherman's Maine Coast Book Shops.
Curtis owns the property that houses stores in Bar Harbor, Boothbay Harbor and Damariscotta. The Camden, Freeport and Portland stores are in rented spaces.
“With all of those accumulated fixed expenses, and then to try to work our way out of that over the course of the summer, which doesn’t look like it’s going to be great, something had to go,” he said. “And we hope Camden will be the only one.”
Curtis said he thinks the three owned locations will survive. But trying to pay rent on the Freeport and Portland locations, even with Camden permanently vacated, might not work, he said.
“They’re high-rent locations,” he said. “To try to open in three months, owing three months rent, that will be a big hole to try to dig out way out of. But I’m hopeful.”
Curtis gave a shout-out to First National Bank, which holds the company’s mortgages.
“They were so cooperative,” he said. “They said, ‘How about taking three months off from loan payments?’ It’s working together that will be required for a lot of businesses to get through this. It just isn’t business as usual.”
The chain is open year-round, but depends on summer business to get through the winter lull.
“If it’s a weak summer it will be tough,” he said. “I know we’ll make it. I just don’t know exactly what we’ll look like at the other end.”
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