There is a particular smell that belongs to Fowler’s Books at 12 Threadneedle Street, and it cannot be replicated by any establishment that has not spent seventy-two years accumulating it. It is the smell of old paper and binding glue and the faint, sweet dust of books that have sat on shelves long enough to become part of the architecture.

Cedric Fowler, who is sixty-seven and has run the shop since his father Oswald’s death in 1986, stood behind the counter on Monday morning and said, with the careful composure of a man who has rehearsed the words: “We will close at the end of April. The lease has been doubled. I cannot meet the terms.”

Oswald Fowler opened the shop in 1954 with a stock of four hundred volumes and a conviction that Bobington needed a bookshop devoted to maps, travel writing, and natural history. He was, by his son’s account, “a man who believed that knowing where you are is the beginning of knowing who you are.” He ran the shop for thirty-two years, built it into one of the city’s most distinctive small businesses, and died at his desk in 1986 with a Greymoor geological survey open in front of him.

Cedric has continued the tradition for forty years. The stock now stands at approximately fourteen thousand volumes — hand-drawn maps of the Narrow Sea, first editions of the great Verlainese explorers, natural history folios that weigh more than a small child, and an entire wall devoted to the birds of the Ashwater Valley that Cedric regards as the shop’s finest collection.

“My father would say that a bookshop is a conversation between the dead and the living,” Fowler said. “I don’t know where this conversation goes next.”

The landlord, Cresswell Properties, declined to comment. The building at 12 Threadneedle Street has housed a bookshop for its entire post-war life. Before that, it was a cartographer’s office. Before that, according to Fowler, “something to do with hats.”

The closure has drawn a quiet but steady response from the shop’s regulars. Professor Thornbury of the Bobington Institute for Foreign Affairs, who has purchased maritime charts from Fowler’s for twenty years, described the news as “a small municipal tragedy.” Pella Strand, the municipal surveyor who bought her first copy of Harwick’s Underground Bobington at the shop as a Polytechnic student, called on Monday afternoon and left without buying anything. She said she would be back.

Fowler has not yet decided what will happen to the fourteen thousand volumes. Some will be sold at reduced prices during the final weeks. Some may go to the Polytechnic library. The maps, he said, are the hardest to place.

“A book finds a reader eventually,” he said. “A map needs someone who wants to go somewhere.”

He paused, and looked at the shelves that line every wall from floor to ceiling, sagging slightly in the middle where the weight of seventy-two years has done its gentle work.

“I’ll miss the smell,” he said. “You can’t pack that up.”