Giant Robot store closing in Silver Lake

In all-too-familiar news, another Los Angeles bookstore is shutting down: Giant Robot in Silver Lake will close its doors on March 28. Until then, its stock -- which includes toys, T-shirts and ephemera as well as books and periodicals -- is on sale, 20% off.

Giant Robot has three other, larger stores -- in San Francisco, New York and West L.A. -- which will stay open. So will its West L.A. restaurant, gr/eats, and Giant Robot the magazine, now 15 years old.

Publisher and co-founder Eric Nakamura explains on his blog that the closure was partly the result of the economic downturn but also the end of a sublease.

“It would still be easy to keep it running until the end of time,” he writes. “If all we did was a Giant Robot Silver Lake store, then you’d see us sitting . . . in that exact shop a year from now. But when an exit strategy presented itself, we decided to take it.”

Giant Robot has always been adaptable.

“With changes in cool things come different types of products,” Nakamura said in an interview. “Books are still important. We publish a magazine, and that’s important too.”

-- Carolyn Kellogg