Last Columbus Little Professor Closes

For more than 30 years, brothers John and George Gaylord were the first and last word in bookselling in the Columbus, Ohio, area. At one point, the two owned seven Little Professor Book Centers in Columbus and Cincinnati. On Monday, the Lane Avenue Little Professor store in Columbus closed without notice, marking the end of that bookselling era.

From 1988 to 1992, the Gaylords expanded three of their stores to superstore size. The Little Professor Book Centers Inc. franchise headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich., worked in conjunction with the Gaylords to package and market these larger-format bookstores as Little Professor Book Company stores (usually 10,000 to 20,000 square feet in size), a deluxe model of the franchise's Little Professor Book Center stores (usually under 10,000 square feet).

The Gaylord family owned the bookstores and six Cookstores (which sold kitchen wares) under the company name of Gaylord Companies Inc. That franchise filed for Chapter 11 in 1997 and was purchased by LP Bookstores.com (a sister company for the United Magazine Company, aka Unimag, which folded in 1999). Over the last two years, the remaining bookstores were run by Eugene Alfonsi, a senior v-p with United Magazines.

The four remaining Gaylord stores soon went the way of United Magazines. The Sawmill Road location closed in 1999, followed by the Boardman site last year and, in January, the Sawmill Plaza store closed.

The 32-year-old Little Professor Book Center, the only franchiser of independently owned bookstores, has 40 locations in 16 states.