Aurora Place Barnes & Noble Is Closing Jan. 13

The Barnes & Noble at Aurora Place in Aurora, Colorado, is set to close Jan. 13, even as the bookstore chain is in the middle of a very real national comeback.

Yes, you read that correctly: Barnes & Noble is expanding across the country, opening new stores and leaning hard into the “people still like books, actually” business model. And yet, Aurora is losing one.

The Aurora Place store has long been one of those reliable suburban staples: a place to browse bestsellers, pretend you’re only going in for one thing, leave with three books, a magazine, a coffee and possibly a journal you absolutely did not need. Its closure will leave local readers looking elsewhere for that particular mix of new-book smell, quiet aisle wandering and mild financial irresponsibility.

The closing date is Jan. 13, according to information circulating about the store’s shutdown. Customers with gift cards, memberships or preorders should check directly with the store or Barnes & Noble before the final day, because retail closings have a way of turning “I’ll stop by later” into “Oh. It’s a Spirit Halloween now.”

The closure comes at an odd moment for Barnes & Noble, which has been one of the more surprising retail rebound stories in recent years. After years of shrinking locations and battling Amazon, e-books, big-box competition and the general 21st-century habit of making everything worse, the chain has been opening stores again.

A lot of that turnaround has been credited to CEO James Daunt, who took over Barnes & Noble in 2019 after leading a revival at the U.K.-based Waterstones. Under his approach, individual stores have been given more freedom to stock books that make sense for their local communities instead of simply stacking the same national front tables everywhere. In other words, bookstores are being allowed to behave more like bookstores and less like corporate vending machines with fluorescent lighting. Revolutionary stuff.

Barnes & Noble has also benefited from the continued popularity of physical books, local browsing and the rise of BookTok, which somehow made reading trendy on an app designed to vaporize attention spans. Credit where it’s due.

But national expansion does not mean every store survives. Retail chains regularly close individual locations because of leases, rent, redevelopment plans, traffic patterns or the deeply glamorous world of commercial real estate spreadsheets. A company can be growing overall while still walking away from a specific site.

That appears to be the case in Aurora: The chain is expanding, but the Aurora Place location is still heading for its final chapter, simply because the lease is up and they’re choosing to walk away.

For local readers, the loss stings because bookstores are not just retail boxes. They are places to kill time, meet authors, buy last-minute gifts, let kids pick out something with dragons on it and briefly convince yourself you are about to become the kind of person who reads hardcover nonfiction before bed.

After Jan. 13, Aurora book shoppers will still be able to order from Barnes & Noble online or visit other nearby locations, depending on where they live and how much they enjoy traffic. Independent bookstores and libraries, of course, remain strong options too — and frankly, the library is always a good choice.

 It’s one less place in Aurora where readers can wander without a plan, discover something unexpected and leave with a tote bag full of optimism.

The Aurora Place Barnes & Noble closes Jan. 13. If there’s a book you’ve been meaning to grab there, now would be the time. Because unlike that stack on your nightstand, this deadline is actually real.