A bookshop owner who plans to sell up so he can retire is hoping that someone will buy his store and keep it going for the community.
The Highgate Bookshop, in Highgate High Street, will close in the near future as owner Michael Goodwin said he must retire before he is "taken out on a stretcher".
The 76-year-old bought the freehold to the shop on the corner of Bisham Gardens in 2000, having bought it from the previous owner he had been working for in the 1990s.
He said: "I'm 76, it's beyond time, it's beginning to look indecent. I'm trying very hard to sell it as a bookshop so it continues to be a bookshop, I feel I owe it to the community.
"But it's not easy as bookshops are not especially profitable, you have to keep buying new stock to keep the shelves full and the freehold is expensive."
Mr Goodwin has run the shop with help from Anna Rawlinson, who was employed by the previous manager in the 1990s.
He said: "She's a great reader and always recommending titles. She knows all the customers very well and all their dogs and all their babies."
He believes that family connection makes the shop part of the community.
"You see someone come in as a baby and they come back in in their 20s and 30s," he continued.
"The bookshop is quite an institution, a great meeting place. It's a landmark particularly because of the situation you can't miss it, a great place on the corner with big windows."
He added: "Highgate would look desolate without a bookshop. There are fewer and fewer independent shops in the village. It's all chains, charity shops or estate agents."
The bookshop will close - or change hands - when he finds a buyer.
"It could be next week, it could be a few months, I don't know," he said.
He said a chain would not buy it as there is no footfall and with the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town and Waterstones in Crouch End "they would be competing with themselves".
"Who wouldn't want to live on a street with a bookshop on the corner? You could say it's a real selling point for estate agents," he added.
"I'll miss it. I have a lot of friends in the village so it will be strange for a while. What I'll do next I'll find out. I'll certainly read a lot of books."
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