Original owner shares ‘last rites’ for Jayhawk Bookstore, says building now up for sale or lease

photo by: Sara Shepherd

Jayhawk Bookstore is located at 1420 Crescent Road, just off the KU campus at Crescent and Naismith Drive.

The owner of the Jayhawk Bookstore building says it’s up for sale or lease.

Bill Muggy owns the building at 1420 Crescent Road, just off the Kansas University campus at Crescent and Naismith Drive. On Thursday, the Jayhawk Bookstore will close its doors for good, leaving the prime spot “at the top of the hill” that the bookstore has occupied since 1978 ripe for something new.

photo by: Sara Shepherd

Jayhawk Bookstore is located at 1420 Crescent Road, just off the KU campus at Crescent and Naismith Drive.

Muggy also is the man who first started the Jayhawk Bookstore all those years ago. I didn’t reach him Tuesday in time to include in my story reporting that the bookstore — now owned by the Levin family of Manhattan, which also owns Varney’s bookstore there — is going out of business.

But Wednesday Muggy shared some additional history.

In 1978 Muggy bought out a six-month-old business called University Shop, which sold KU garments and some school supplies, and turned it into Jayhawk Bookstore, carrying texts for all courses. (Originally 1,800 square feet, he said, it’s now 9,500.) In 2010 Muggy sold the business to Nebraska Book Company, which sold it to the Levin family in 2013.

“Daily buyback, best selection of used books on campus, personal customer service, a broad selection of course supply needs, seven-day-a-week hours and working with instructors for reorders, late orders, and special requests were the elements of succeeding from the beginning,” Muggy said.

In the 30-plus years Muggy ran Jayhawk Bookstore, he recalls promotions and milestones including but not limited to purchasing a double-decker bus called “The Briti Bus,” selling the first Kansas lottery ticket, sponsoring the University Daily Kansan’s game-day satire pages, selling Pepsi products when campus-proper was all-Coke and an ongoing rivalry with the KU Memorial Union-operated, on-campus KU Bookstore.

“Anytime the KU Bookstore imitated one of my ideas, I created two more,” Muggy said.

Sandwiched between a nice residential neighborhood, a historic sorority house and KU academic buildings, the Jayhawk Bookstore property also dealt with zoning battles through the years, he said. Muggy said two restricted expansions and an eventual rezoning for sustainable commercial use were attained, “but not without years of struggle and legal hassles.”

photo by: Sara Shepherd

A going out of business banner outside Jayhawk Bookstore, 1420 Crescent Road, is pictured on June 28, 2016.

For Jayhawk Bookstore’s last day, Muggy said he wanted to share these “last rites”:

I was blessed with hundreds of
dedicated employees who lived their
work and accomplishments to my
philosophy of “convey your work like a
proud artist signing his work.”
Hundreds of thousands of customers
opened our doors hopefully finding our
personal attention to their needs and
service above their expectations. We
strived to provide faculty staff and
visitors with solutions to needs and
suggestions if we could not
accommodate them. To all of the above
individuals, my sincere thanks and
appreciation for being part of our
nearly four decades of business.

Being a maverick, I delighted in
creating promotions, competitive
challenges, non-traditional events and
commissioning a stick-in-your-head
jingle…

But the bookstore industry and class
materials have imploded through the
internet sales and e-media resources.
As the doors are locked and the last
customer leaves today I join the
current Jayhawk Bookstore owners Jon,
Jeff and Steve Levin in a quiet sorrow
and mourning for the end of a Lawrence
and KU landmark.

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• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage here. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.