‘Notting Hill’ star’s days are numbered
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One of the stars of the movie 1999 ‘Notting Hill’ has only two weeks left to live. Don’t worry, it’s not Hugh Grant, and it’s not Julia Roberts, either. It’s the Travel Bookshop, a real bookstore in London that acted as the bookstore owned by Grant in the movie.
The bookstore, which is offering all its stock at half price, is slated to close in two weeks. It’s hoping that it might recruit authors to help keep it going, the Guardian reports:
A campaign has been launched to save the store with a handful of writers and poets offering to volunteer a day a week to help run it if a new buyer can be found. Poet and journalist Olivia Cole, 30, said that she had spent a great deal of time in the bookshop and didn’t want it to close. ‘It’s an amazing specialist bookshop and it has the Notting Hill novelty but it is the same sad story that we’re seeing in high streets all over the country. Loads of independent bookshops are having a bad time. With a bookshop like that being so unique and so well loved, I was amazed when I heard it was closing,’ she said. Cole, who said she also used the store ‘for work and day-dreaming’ said she was willing to volunteer one day a week in the hope that lower running costs might attract a buyer. ‘We [are] hoping to rally writers and poets and volunteers to the idea,’ she said. ‘The thought that you could run into a poet or writer while doing your book browsing would also add to the appeal.’
There is hope that a last-minute buyer might be found. Calling Hugh Grant ...
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-- Carolyn Kellogg
