What a shame! After being in operation for almost half a century, the legendary Cody's Books finally closed its last bookstore on Shattuck Avenue. The Japanese owner cited dropping sales and rising cost as the main reasons the closure of the book store. To me, Cody's Books is a bookstore with a large selections of books and a group of very knowledgeable salespeople that supported local authors. It also brought many prominent speakers including including Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners to Berkeley whose talks I had attended. What a great loss to the Berkeley community as it was a landmark in Berkeley, a well-stocked cornerstone of literacy for the thousands of students and faculty patrons from nearby UC Berkeley and a practitioner of free-speech principles.