After news broke Tuesday that The Travel Bookshop -- a real London store made famous by the the 1999 romantic comedy Notting Hill, in which Hugh Grant plays its beleaguered owner -- was closing, literary and Hollywood types started a small campaign to save the popular store and tourist attraction.
A group of writers, including poet Olivia Cole, have volunteered to work in the store for free to keep the lights on. The campaign to save the shop began, as these sorts of things inevitably do, on Twitter.
Cole's tweets of support for the Travel Bookshop were echoed by tour guides and writers who bring visitors to London to the shop and have been long time customers themselves. Even Alec Baldwin, who played Julia Robert's Hollywood boyfriend in Notting Hill, tweeted his support for the 32-year-old shop.
The bookshop is currently selling marked down books as part of a two-week going out of business sale. A spokesperson for the company that owns the independent store, European Estates Plc, told TheBookSeller.com in May that the owner's " adult children have indicated that they would rather not follow him into the business and so he feels that the continuance of the trade would be best served by selling it on for a new generation to look after one of London's iconic and special bookshops."