Clark Kepler has postponed filing for bankruptcy while a group of investors mobilizes with hopes of re-opening his Menlo Park bookstore, which closed Aug. 31. Also, Rick Opaterny, a writer, Google employee and Kepler’s regular, has launched a website, www.savekeplers.com.[via Ghost Word]

Firoozeh Dumas shares her thoughts about her local bookstore:

It is not an exaggeration to say that I owe a good part of my career to Kepler’s. They are the only bookstore that displayed my book, Funny in Farsi, in a prominent place, then kept it there. You can’t even find my book at the big chains… It’s in the Sociology section at Borders, right next to Erotica and the men’s bathroom. Not exactly a high volume browsing area… Kepler’s put my book by the entrance because the staff liked it, not because someone paid for that space. I can’t compete with writers whose publishing houses pay big bucks for displays in the big chains. I can only pray that places like Kepler’s exist so that housewives- turned-writers like me, we little people without big publicists, have even a chance of surviving the book world. When I heard that Kepler’s was closing, I said, “No way. It won’t happen.” Now it looks like investors have stepped in to save it. A world without bookstores like Keplers is not a place where I would like to live.