Beloved bookstore Cellar Stories closing after 40 years in Providence

Ask Cellar Stories customers about their memories of the shop, and they'll tell you their memories of Michael Chandley.

Though he died in 2018, his spirit lives on in the life of the store. A shrine to the late owner rests on a small shelf at the front of the place where a glass of whiskey sits to comfort his ghost.

A flip phone and a plastic buffalo keep the whiskey company — all reminders of Chandley and his nickname, "Buffalo," a tribute to a sizeable man.

Just behind the buffalo is a red datebook, the last one in which Chandley wrote. He meticulously tracked his appointments, which were mostly dates to view personal collections of books he might wish to acquire. To this day, the store managers can still track down the origins of much of their inventory.

Beneath the front desk, a book-shaped box holds Chandley's ashes — a fitting resting place for a man who loved his job.

Come January, Victoria Forsberg-Lary and Justine Johnson, who have been running the store in Chandley's absence, will close up shop for good.

Forsberg-Lary made the announcement earlier this month, explaining in a Facebook post that "we’ve been informed that we are not going to be able to stay in our current location."

While Forsberg-Lary said the building is being sold, her departure was long planned, and she gave notice two years ago about her intent to move on. In Forsberg-Lary's telling, it was Chandley's death that spelled the eventual end of the store.

"Basically, since Mike died, everything has kind of been in this weird sort of limbo," Forsberg-Lary said, noting that she knew "it wouldn’t be long-term."

After his death, Forsberg-Lary, who has worked at the store since 2014, became the only person with the knowledge of the ins and outs of its operations. No one in the Chandley family had interest in taking over. Johnson, who worked there around the mid-2000s and had left, then offered to return to help out. For about five months, she pitched in as a volunteer before the store could add her to the payroll.

From that point on, the store chugged along with a devoted following. But Forsberg-Lary suspects customers knew it wouldn't last forever.

"Mike really was Cellar Stories," she said. "So I think for a lot of people, when Mike left, they kind of started distancing themselves emotionally from the store a little."

But the shop's history remains vivid in the minds of those it has touched. Exactly when it opened remains a little blurry. Forsberg-Lary said Ray Hodde, who opened its first location with Chandley at 184 Mathewson St. in Providence, "believes strongly that the store started in 1982," but Chandley used to say it was 1981.

Eventually, it moved to 190 Mathewson, then to its current spot at 111 Mathewson.

Dale Rogers, a relative of Chandley, who was the brother of Rogers' brother-in-law, remembers helping with one of the moves in the late 1990s.

"We had about 20 or 30 people and we’d pull up in our cars and somebody [would] come running down the stairs and be bringing books down to the bottom of the stairs," Rogers said. "We’d jump out, throw eight or 10 boxes in our car, drop them off at the other place, circle around the block. It was kind of crazy."

Despite the chaos, they managed to finish the work in a single day, and Chandley never again let Rogers pay full price for a book.

"He was just a real peach of a guy," Rogers said. "He was just a real nice guy that loved his books."

Rogers remembers what it was like to walk into the second-floor shop, which at any given moment houses between 50,000 and 100,000 books — all second-hand and most under $10.

"There was a certain amount of anticipation just walking up the stairs," he said. "And when you flung open the doors to go inside, it was like you stepped back into something Dickensian. He just had rows and rows and rows of books."

Mary Hatheway, Chandley's cousin, remembers the smell of old books, one that reminded her of the library she frequented as a child in Lincoln.

"There’s this warmth," Hatheway said of the store. "And it is kind of like cavernous because there’s just books surrounding you from floor to ceiling, but it’s just the feeling of a familiar place and comfort, I guess."

In the future, Forsberg-Lary and Johnson intend to remain in the bookselling business, but not as Cellar Stories. The two plan to sell rare and collectible books online, using picks from the shop's inventory.

They aren't yet sure what will happen with the rest of the books. But from now through the start of the New Year, shoppers can scoop them up at deep discounts.

If you're lucky, you'll find a sign of Chandley inside. Look for a pencil-marked price on the corner of the first page.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Cellar Stories in Providence closing in January