Today Parkplace Books celebrates what might be its final holiday party after 29 years of operation in downtown Kirkland.

Owned jointly by Mary haris and Rebecca Willow, the store is set to close at its current location on Christmas Eve in anticipation of Parkplace’s redevelopment planned sometime next year. With Willow’s announced retirement and a new location still unknown, Harris said that its future will depend on her ability to find a new partner.

Opened in 1986, Parkplace Books was originally owned by a couple before it was purchased by Harris and Willow in 2002. Harris first joined the bookstore in 1989, after having worked in stores around the world. One of the things that attracted her to Parkplace Books was that it’s independently managed, as opposed to a chainstore. Living close by where her children attended school, it seemed an ideal place to work.

“The store just had a great feel to it,” she said. “It was a place you wanted to be.”

Willow later came on in 1991 after running a store on Lake Street in the 1980s. Working at Grape Choice in downtown, she got a part-time job at the bookstore that later became full-time. When one of the owners decided to retire, the two purchased the store.

“We had a desire to keep it going,” Harris said. “We loved the work, we loved being here.”

Throughout the years, they’ve seen book crazes come and go, sometimes reflected in the book sales, other times in the number of people who show up to an opening night. By far the largest one, they said, was their party for the first Harry Potter book, in which 1,000 people showed up and police were needed to guard the books, which they had wrapped chains around in good fun. While waiting for midnight when they could finally open the books they had preordered, the customers had activities throughout the evening, one of which was mimicking scenes from the books like choosing their Hogwarts house.

“Every time someone got Slytherin they got hysterical,” Harris said.

Other large gatherings included “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie and “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” by Jamie Ford.

They’ve also seen major changes in the industry, such as the introduction of e-books affect not just sales but the way people browse a bookstore.

“I think one of the things that is different is that a lot of people already know what they’re looking for,” Harris said. “There’s so much advertising now.”

Harris, who doesn’t own or use e-books, believes that the sentimental value of physical copies outweight the advantages that come with being able to hold hundreds of books in a thin tablet.

“I don’t see how you can have a library without a physical book,” she said. “If you don’t own the book you don’t have your own personal history. It reminds you of where you were when you read it.”

However, Harris said that the biggest impact on their store hasn’t been e-books or online stores but the recession.

Despite the presence of online bookstores such as Amazon or even Barnes and Noble, Harris said that physical location offers people the opportunity to discover books they would love but otherwise not find.

“If you browse the shelves you’ll find some gems you wouldn’t find online,” she said.

Willow added that, being readers themselves, they have offered reading recommendations to customers, and they’ve built a strong reputation in the community as a result.

“We’ve really been community centered,” Willow said.

“A bookstore provides a kind of gateway place for people without the pressure of having to buy a cup of coffee,” Harris said. “They know they’ll be able to see their friends, they know they’ll see people they know there.”

The holiday party today, they said, is an open invitation to all the local authors and open to people who’ve supported them through the years to celebrate one last time.

“I think it’s contributed to the outpouring of dismay without fail [about the store’s closure]. People really want the bookstore to contribute.”

Now that their building will be demolished to make way for Kirkland Urban, Harris said that she’ll need to find someone else to help keep it going by the time the store closes, at which point she’ll decide whether to keep the name or change it depending on where they move.

“A lot of other things have to fall into place,” she said. “It’s just too big of a job to do on my own.”