If you have never heard of Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park, California, you won’t feel the full weight of my next sentence.

Kepler’s went out of business on August 31st.

To give you some sense of this loss, it may help to note that the New York Times, a newspaper of some repute on the other side of the country with much more critical human losses to report last week, took notice and published a full article. In it Stewart Brand calls Kepler’s “a pillar of local civilization.”

A letter from Clark Kepler, also posted on their website, announced the sad news to visitors to the store.

“After 50 years of bookselling in Menlo Park, Kepler’s is going out of business. 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.”

Community efforts are underway to see if the store can be saved: www.savekeplers.com. On the website you’ll see photos of the messages scrawled on scraps of paper and posters taped to the store, flowers left at the locked doors. And of course there are links to numerous newspaper articles lamenting the closing. The mayor of Menlo Park has spoken up and apparently the city has been involved for a few months in negotiations between Kepler and building owner, the Tan group.

I could write a page or two on what Kepler’s meant to me…the fact that it had an actual separate section for Cognitive Science books, that every Christmas I would go to find interesting cookbooks for gifts, that there wasn’t a shelf I found boring, that every time we saw more books shelved facing out (meaning less inventory to store spine out) I worried the end was near. The fact remains that I sometimes shopped online because it was more convenient and at used bookstores because I love that browsing experience (and I’m a cheapskate). But I did not want Kepler’s to go away.