The final chapter for a longtime Shore stalwart

AVALON, N.J. - When you walk into the Paper Peddler, there is an accumulated-over-time perfume of ink and paper - a vintage scent in an era when electronic devices have taken over delivering the written words of books, magazines, and newspapers.

And so - shut out by potential customers who would sooner take a photo of the cover of a book with a plan to download it later and a dwindling customer base of print newspaper readers - the Paper Peddler will close its doors at the end of the month after 46 years.

"So much of what we have always sold is just not what people want to buy anymore," says owner Craig Cunningham, 57, motioning to an empty Kodak film-holder display.

Beneath it is the empty spot where hundreds of cartons of dozens of brands of cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco once held court, bygone in an era when fewer people smoke due to health risks. But other shelves in the narrow shop still hold the trappings of a simple day at the beach: suntan lotion, Ping-Pong balls, candy bars, and gum.

Even lottery sales have flagged after the state allowed a nearby Wawa to cut into Cunningham's previously exclusive domain.

Cunningham also blames a changing demographic in a town where a trend toward fewer and fewer rental properties - and more vacation homes used exclusively by the owners - means a smaller weekly turnover of customers looking to buy a replacement for the bottle of sunscreen they forgot to pack or magazines to peruse during their stay.

Despite a wall-long wooden rack of magazines - 220 titles - and newspapers from all over the region and world, the heart and soul of the store had always been the book department. That's where Cunningham's girlfriend of more than 20 years, Deborah Martinelli, a former middle-school English teacher, presided over the heavily curated selection.

Martinelli's picks have been so well-regarded locally that she has been helping a local book club make its selections for years, and a cadre of regular store customers depended on her to help them decide on their summer beach reads or locate hard-to-find titles on obscure subject matters, like British aeronautical history or Ming Dynasty apparel. The shop also contained a remarkable number of local history books.

"The hardest part of closing the store, for me, will be losing that daily contact with the customers . . . that hand-selling of a book," said Martinelli. "This summer has been a little like going to a daily funeral. Saying goodbye to everyone has been difficult for us."

But it's the ephemera department that has taken the biggest hit, according to Cunningham, who began to notice a change in reader/buyer habits several years ago and subsequent dwindling profits in a family business that was begun in 1968 by Cunningham's late mother, Jane Ann Pearson Cunningham. She had been such a voracious reader - consuming as many as three books a day - that Cunningham's father, a physician who had relocated the family to the Jersey Shore from the Main Line, thought it would be more cost-effective to just set her up in the bookselling business.

Perhaps it was their family's connection to words - John D. Cunningham had been an early owner of the Cape May County Herald newspaper - that sustained them through decades of ownership of the Paper Peddler.

"It's a business that my siblings and I worked at different times and we loved it," Cunningham said. "But we've become like a showroom for books, rather than a bookseller. You just can't compete in a world where people who will come in and take a picture of a book with their phone and tell you to your face that they're going to go download later. You just can't survive as a small business that way."

Cunningham is among purveyors of printed material that continue to be edged out by an information-consuming public that in the U.S. reports using an average of between four and five different devices for access to information on a weekly basis, according to a study released earlier this year by the Media Insight Project.

The data from the survey of 1,500 Americans, which was designed to probe what adults distinguish most in their news consumption in the digital age, offered a portrait of Americans spanning all age groups becoming increasingly comfortable using technology in ways that take advantage of the strengths of each medium and device.

Cunningham said he could see the writing on the wall and knew that it was time to get out of the paper purveying business after this summer.

But it's not an easy leap. His father passed away in 2013. And their family home was recently sold and is slated to be torn down to make way for someone else's new vacation home.

"So many of my touchstones are being wiped away at this moment, so it's a situation that really breaks my heart," said Cunningham, who is expected to be honored with a special proclamation Wednesday by the Avalon Borough Commission and Mayor Martin Pagliughi.

And what may become of the unique fragrance of shops such as Cunningham's?

SmellofBooks.com has created an aerosol "e-book enhancer" that captures the "smell of books" in two fragrances, "New Book Smell" and "Classic Musty."

But Kathy Wallace, a longtime customer of the Paper Peddler, isn't sold.

"There's nothing for me that can ever replace this place, certainly nothing in an aerosol can," said Wallace, 60, a retired investment banker who remembers buying her first Nancy Drew book there with money she saved up from babysitting. "This place is the essence of the Shore, of old Avalon. It's irreplaceable."