A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books: “We deeply regret to announce that we will be closing A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books as soon as we can liquidate our inventory.”

[UPDATE: Frances Dinkelspiel has more and bemoans the many Bay Area bookstore closings this year. The Bay Area may be an underreported literary mecca, but the hard truth is that these literary interests aren’t always compatible with profit and there aren’t enough courageous people willing to sustain many of these pivotal conduits. The recent end of the Books by the Bay festival and the slimming down of the Chronicle‘s book review section are troublingly self-evident on this front.]