Holiday Shopping on Larchmere: Loganberry Books

Editor's note: In this three-part series, Shaker Heights Patch will talk to a Larchmere Boulevard merchant about holiday shopping about buying from local businesses.

If you have a bookworm on your holiday shopping list, Loganberry Books might be worth a try. Just make sure you have time — the store has about 70,000 books for sale, a holiday annex and a cat named Otis who likes to cozy up to shoppers.

Here's more information about the 18-year-old business store:

1. What makes it a destination?

Categories at this shop extend well beyond the fiction and non-fiction selections at most stores. Among those 70,000 books are titles in categories like Collectibles, Local History, Leather and Decorative and Books on Books.

"I think that one thing people don't quite get is that because we used to be used and rare books, (they don't realize) you can call us up for a new book and we can have it for you," employee and author Sarah Willis said. "You can support an independent bookstore in the same way that you could order a book on Amazon."

Willis said orders take one or two days.

2. What is the business doing for the holidays?

Loganberry hosts a different gallery each month in its annex gallery. For the holidays, the store offers Otis' Old Curiosity Shop, the holiday section named after owner Harriett Logan's cat.

The annex sells Christmas and Hanukkah cards, handmade and international gifts and ornaments.

3. How vital is holiday shopping to this business?

"This is retail, so holiday shopping is very important," Logan said. "If you do it right, you could do half of your year in three months."

The owner says the store is close to that mark so far.

4. Why you should shop locally this holiday season

"One dollar spent in a local store, 80 percent of that's going to stay in the community," Logan said. "If you spend it online, none of it will stay. We pay sales tax to support our roads and our schools. Amazon doesn't want to pay a sales tax even when they exist somewhere ... You've got communities who can't balance their budgets — that's because you have people who are not supporting their own communities, buying things elsewhere, shirking."