SAN JOSE — The metal shelves at Roberts Book Store once groaned under the weight of a whole world of knowledge the little shop opened to San Jose State students. But now that the store is going out of business — 54 years after it began selling densely footnoted texts such as “Thinking Mathematically” and “Government in America” to college kids, then buying the books back at semester’s end — the shelves are eerily empty, and most of the groaning comes from the sexagenarian sisters who own the joint.

“Students are done buying books,” says Robyn Winegardner, surveying a fallow hardback harvest that will not be replanted this spring. “If they don’t have ’em by now, they’re flunking. The stuff in the store now is pretty much what I’m stuck with.”

Winegardner and her sister, Karen Ries, have spent most of their lives within these walls, starting as young girls, when they were paid $2 a day and fed lunch by their father, the eponymous Robert. “My sister is left-handed,” says Winegardner, tattling amiably, “and she used to write the price tags bass-ackwards,”

Every year, from December through February, the sisters would work seven days a week and 10 to 12 hours a day. “It’s our addiction, work,” says Ries, who has two children, as does a third sister — Lori Keil — in Los Angeles. “That’s what our children don’t want to do. And I don’t blame them. They want vacations.”

Paddle season

So the lights at what used to be a crowded book emporium on South 10th Street will go out sometime after May 25, after more than half a century as a staple of Spartan life. Roberts — which disdains the apostrophe because Robert Winegardner regarded the bookstore and its contents as “not his possession,” according to Ries — is just across the street from the urban campus, situated in the heart of the school’s Greek row.

Members of fraternities and sororities from colleges in San Francisco, and from UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University and Santa Clara University, make pilgrimages to Roberts for the tiny, wooden Greek letters the store began selling 20 years ago. The letters are glued to paddles, which are a key component of certain ritualistic adolescent savageries during pledge season. “It kept us going during the books’ quiet time,” Ries says. “Paddles are very seasonal.” In fact, one reason the store will stay open through most of May is to service the Bay Area’s pledge-paddling needs.

No romance

Even in its heyday, there was little of the romance of an independent bookstore — its shelves brimming with literary fiction, a calico cat sunning itself in the window. At college textbook shops like Roberts, the sales staff couldn’t care less about turning customers onto hot new titles. Nowhere are there handwritten cards saying, “Carmen recommends giving ‘Introduction to Kinesiology’ a try!”

Author. Title. Course number. That’s it.

“We don’t sell books here by trying to get people to buy them,” Ries explains. “We don’t have to do that. We tell our employees, ‘It’s not your job to push a sale.’ Your job is to show them which book is for what class.”

The store was always a willing captive to class curriculum. “We don’t even get to choose our stock,” Winegardner says. “We don’t pick a book because it sells well or because it’s a popular author. If the school offers Business 130, which is the intro to marketing, there may be 10 sections of it with 10 different instructors, and they can use 10 different books.” If Roberts wanted to serve students, it played a game of chance by ordering all 10 books in sufficient quantities to assure there were enough for everybody.

Sometimes a professor would stop by to gauge supplies for his class, but more often, instructors remained just a name from the course catalog. Some became notorious by name. “You just knew they weren’t going to turn in their textbook order on time,” Winegardner says. “And they taught three or four classes every semester. The art of it was making a guess on a title.” With no guidance from a teacher, the store had to make a blind bet on a book. “So you live on the edge and you do it,” she says. “When the student comes looking for it and there are 15 copies, you go, ‘Yes!’ “

‘Getting screwed’

For half a century, the school shared information with the store about what texts would be used for the coming semester’s classes.

Forms were prepared in quadruplicate, with one copy always designated for Roberts. But when a new shop called Beat the Bookstore opened on Paseo de San Antonio in 2005, using a sales pitch that Winegardner summarizes as “You’re getting screwed by the bookstore,” the rules changed. And last November, just as it was dawning on the sisters that the family business was slipping away, a representative from the Spartan Bookstore, which is now operated by Barnes and Noble, delivered word it would no longer be sharing information with Roberts.

It was a sign, Winegardner says. “But that’s not what put us under.”

The final straw was the old store’s lease, which had begun to eat up all the profits. The sisters say they will buy back books from San Jose State students when the semester ends, just as they always have. But this time they will be sold off to wholesalers, not kids loading up their backpacks with all the world’s knowledge.

Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004. Follow him at Twitter.com/BruceNewmanTwit.