Wendy Parker

Customers rolling in Saturday for a reopening event at the Bookmiser independent bookstore saw a whole new space.

There was new flooring, rearranged bookshelves and more open space for events.

Five months after sustaining heavy damage due to a fire, Gerson and her staff welcomed back book-lovers whose shopping has been limited to online or pop-up sales since then.

“It’s beautiful!” said a customer to co-owner Annell Gerson, who has operated the store with her husband at the Village East Shopping Center on Roswell Road since 2010.

“I’m glad you made it through. I know it was a lot of work.”

Bookmiser and other tenants were forced to close after the adjacent Owl Repairs computer shop caught fire. Nearly half of Gerson’s inventory of 35,000 books was damaged or destroyed, and the interior structure sustained heavy soot and smoke damage.

After she and her staff and volunteers packed up the remaining books for storage, remediation efforts gutted what was left.

“They took out everything,” Gerson said, pointing to the walls, floor and ceiling. “Down to the cinder blocks.”

All but the Owl Repairs business have reopened. Bookmiser’s full range of services, including special orders, as well as operating hours, have resumed as they were.

What has transpired since that late September Sunday morning was more of an ordeal than Gerson bargained for.

While the look and feel of the store is new and inviting, the process of reopening took longer than she wanted.

“It’s been five months to the day” since the fire, Gerson noted on Saturday, shortly before holding a book event, and she was mindful that “there were opportunities to buy books” elsewhere.

A couple of weeks ago, she announced a Feb. 28 reopening, even though her insurance company hadn’t fully signed off on all the renovations to the bathroom.

“They approved the toilet, but not the sink,” she said, adding that once she said a date, she was going to reopen regardless.

Gerson updated customers on a regular basis, and urged them to shop at Bookshop, an online competitor to Amazon that distributes 30 percent of sales to independent stores, as well as libro.fm, an audio bookseller.

“We got some benefit from that, and we saw a lot of people supporting us,” she said, adding that pop-up events located at a nearby storage facility also helped.

She also held some book club events as the Stitched fabric and quilting store at Village East.

But not being able to be open during the Christmas shopping season was the biggest drawback for Gerson, who has held her own in a book market that includes Half-Price Books and Barnes and Noble in close vicinity.

She and her husband originally opened the store at Merchants Festival Shopping Center in the late 1990s, when the Bruno’s grocery store was the anchor.

Bookmiser endured disruptive renovations there as Target came in, then Gerson relocated the store to its present location.

After the fire, the inventory features less non-fiction than it did before (she said she donated 15,000 partially damaged books to Roswell-area libraries and a children’s charity).

“We’re not going to have as many books as we did before,” Gerson said, adding that “a finely curated inventory is our goal.”

There’s more space for author events and for the seven book clubs that meet at Bookmiser, with enough room for about 60 people.

(The next author event at Bookmiser is with mystery writer Chuck Storla on March 15 from 4-5:30 p.m. His latest book is “Murder Two Doors Down,” published in October, about the killing of a homeowners association board member in a suburban Atlanta neighborhood.)

On Saturday, Gerson was greeted warmly by customers with hugs, and she later remarked that there were “so many people, so many friends” who came by.

Her community ties run deep—she’s a former English teacher at Dickerson Middle School—and the well-wishers reminded her of what she has fashioned as her legacy running a bookstore.

“They just wanted to connect, to feed their love of books,” she said.

Bookmiser (website) is located at 3822 Roswell Road and is open Monday-Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.

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