John Hutton, who with his wife, Sandra Gross, purchased Cincinnati’s 29-year-old Blue Manatee Bookstore 17 years ago from its previous owner, Pat Randolph, announced in a tweet this past weekend that the couple is putting the bookstore up for sale—and will close its doors on January 14 if a new owner is not found by then.

The store, founded in 1989, has been a nominee a number of times for the WNBA Pannell Awards, which each year honors a general bookstore and a children’s specialty bookstore for enhancing their communities by using exceptional creativity to inspire young people to become book lovers.

There are currently two full-time and eight part-time booksellers at the store, which is well-known in Cincinnati for its story times and author events. The store, which moved last year from its old location to a new one half a block away, stocks more than 20,000 titles.

In a letter posted on the store’s website, Hutton, a pediatrician, explained that he’d been named director of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s Reading and Literacy Discovery Center, with which he has been affiliated since its launch in 2012. The Reading and Literacy Discovery Center studies children’s reading and literacy, including the impact of excessive electronic media on brain development.

“The Center is growing rapidly,” he wrote. “For the past few years, I have tried to balance these things, to the detriment of my health and well-being, but I must finally accept that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day, or neurotransmitters in my brain to do this in an effective or sustainable way.”

At the same time, Gross, an artist and teacher, is running an art studio, and both Hutton and Gross also are overseeing operations of two cafes that they own.

“A beloved, world-class children’s bookstore deserves a full-time steward—or a group of stewards—to focus their energies as we once did,” Hutton wrote. “The Blue Manatee needs new life, new ideas, new energy.” And, in a reference to how he and Gross walked into the previous incarnation of The Blue Manatee (then called The Blue Marble) on a cold December evening in 2000, and decided to buy it from Randolph so as to prevent its imminent closing, Hutton wrote, “It needs someone to walk in the door on a snowy night.”

In 2011, Hutton launched Blue Manatee Press, which publishes children’s books, primarily board books and picture books. Blue Manatee Press released six books this fall and three books in spring 2018. There are more than 60 Blue Manatee Press titles in print, which are distributed by IPG.

Hutton told PW that he intends to continue running Blue Manatee Press, which he said has had a 40% increase in sales this year over last.

“[Blue Manatee Press] is expanding its list and penetration into retail, library, and nonprofit markets, including Reach Out and Read and other programs. Titles involve health literacy topics such as safe sleep, ADHD and breastfeeding, and literacy promotion, e.g. dialogic reading and a novel method for infants and toddlers we are pilot testing, acronym SHARE STEP. This work very much aligns with my academic focus and passions,” he wrote.

Blue Manatee’s third division, Blue Manatee Boxes, an e-commerce website also launched in 2011 specializing in gift packages of board books curated by Hutton and other Blue Manatee booksellers, will be shared in future between the press and the bookstore.

In an email to PW on Monday, Hutton wrote that since the announcement was made over the weekend, he has been “literally inundated with queries,” ranging from “generic ‘exciting business opportunity’ to impassioned book lovers wanting to help however they can. “If only we could sublimate this love and devotion to what Blue Manatee stands for into daily foot traffic, our financial anxieties would be solved!”

Hutton said that he and Gross will consider all offers by prospective buyers, but, “akin to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” they want a person or group who will carry on the store’s mission: “providing the best in children’s books and related activities/gift items, quality programming and author events, and championing values of tolerance, community, imagination, and a smackerel of insurgency.”