Shed a tear, Toronto, as one more independent bookstore bites the dust.

TheatreBooks, a fixture on the local scene since it opened in 1975, announced Friday that it would be closing its doors due to “the changing retail landscape.”

The news comes fairly soon on the heels of the March shuttering of The Cookbook Store, another longtime successful specialty book shop in the midtown area.

Founded in 1975 by John Harvey and Leonard McHardy, TheatreBooks was, to many thousands of Torontonians in the arts, more than just a place to purchase scripts, screenplays and books about theatre and film. It provided a gathering place for like-minded people, a centre for gossip and news and a place where visiting authors could be celebrated for signings and speeches.

Over the years, it moved several times, but its glorious home at 11 St. Thomas St., where it was from 1992 to 2012, is the location people will best remember. During that period, it was frequently cited as one of the most successful of all independent booksellers in North America.

The shop was forced to leave that location two years ago because of real estate development and spent its last two years in quarters on Spadina Ave.

It’s interesting to note that, in 1998, McHardy and several other specialist booksellers banded together to fight against what they perceived as the major threat to their existence: the “superstores” like Chapters and Indigo.

No one anticipated that within 15 years, the superstores would be feeling the chill as well and that every bookseller’s worst enemy would be electronic devices like Kindle and Kobo, as well as online sales from the likes of Amazon.

The exact closing date for TheatreBooks is yet to be settled, but a closing sale is in effect at the 101 Spadina Ave. site as of Saturday.

Editor’s Note: The headline of this article has been changed to correct the number of years that TheatreBooks has been open. A previous headline stated that TheatreBooks was closing after 25 years.