Nearly five years ago, Roxanne Coady, the force behind R.J. Julia Booksellers, announced she was looking for someone to buy her independent bookstore in downtown Madison.

She never found that someone.

Instead, she's doubled down on the business she once wanted to step away from. R.J. Julia is doing well, and Coady’s team is now managing a second bookstore that a friend of Coady’s opened on Long Island in East Hampton, N.Y.

And, in late November, Wesleyan University announced that R.J. Julia will manage the school’s new bookstore at a storefront location in downtown Middletown.

While many colleges have turned to corporate operators like Barnes & Noble to run their bookstores, Coady said few have partnered with an independent bookseller.

For more than a decade, the City of Middletown had been encouraging Wesleyan to relocate its existing bookstore, Broad Street Books, from Broad Street to Main Street, according to Nathan Peters, the college's vice president for finance and administration.

Coady, 67, said Wesleyan had long been after her to manage its store, which is run by Follett, an outfit that bills itself as the biggest campus store operator in North America.

Finally, the time was right.

“We’ll design it, staff it, stock it, run it,” Coady said of the new Middletown store, scheduled to open in May at 413 Main St. “It’s a model we’ve used in East Hampton,” the Long Island village where Book Hampton opened this past Memorial Day.

Wesleyan is making "a significant initial investment in the project," according to Peters.

Coady said her February 2012 call for prospective buyers of R.J. Julia elicited more than 30 responses. Eight candidates advanced to a second stage of the vetting process.

The eight included some who wanted Coady to stick around to manage the store — “That didn’t appeal to me,” she said — and some who wanted to make changes she couldn’t quite countenance.

“I was determined to preserve the way it is,” she said of the Madison store.

In the end, none of the potential buyers represented a perfect fit. If one had, Coady said, she would have sold.

“I was pretty worn down,” she said.

Ironically, the prospect of selling caused Coady to take steps that strengthened R.J. Julia, helping persuade her to take it off the market.

“I knew that if I really did sell, it would have to be because I knew my team could do it without me,” she said. “So, I started to train people to do what I was doing.”

Coady said her store manager, Lori Fazio, “is a better manager than I ever was.” Coady focused on marketing and strategy. The store, she said, started to do better.

At about the same time, the climate for independent bookstores in general began to improve.

“Borders’ closing helped,” Coady said, referring to the bookstore chain that went bankrupt in 2011. “Then people came to understand that Amazon (the online retailer) is not your friendly neighborhood bookseller,” but rather “an ambitious, greedy corporate titan."

“They don’t donate to your local community, they’re not paying local taxes, they’re not hiring local people,” she said.

Coady believes readers also have re-embraced the tactile rewards associated with books and the social aspects of purchasing them. Sales of digital versions, or ebooks, have flattened, she said.

“The more high-tech we are, the more high touch we need,” she said. “People who are readers respond to the serendipity of being in a space. You might not know you want to read a book about trees until you come across a book about trees.”

Wesleyan, Middletown officials and the Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce, headed by Larry McHugh, the chairman of the UConn Board of Trustees, expect the R.J. Julia-run bookstore to help energize Middletown’s resurgent downtown.

“The new bookstore will enrich and nurture relationships between faculty, alumni and students,” Peters wrote in an email. “It will be a valuable resource not only to Wesleyan, but to Middletown and the surrounding area. The selected location builds connections to downtown, which will reinforce the flow of pedestrians from campus to Main Street and on to the riverfront.”

Wesleyan is working with a developer to create a space filled with natural light. Some 7,000 square feet of space will be refurbished on the main floor and part of a lower area — more square footage than the R.J. Julia store in Madison occupies.

The store is located about six-tenths of a mile from the Wesleyan campus, about twice as far away as the existing bookstore. Shuttles will run between the campus and the store at the beginning of each semester, when textbooks are in demand, Peters said. A nighttime shuttle that runs on weekends will stop in front of the store.

Coady, who employs 40 people at her Madison store, said she will hire 15 to 20 to staff the Middletown store. She’s narrowed a list of contenders to operate a café there to three, including the one that runs RJ Café & Bistro at the Madison store.

The parties have yet to settle on a name for the new store, but "Wesleyan" and "R.J. Julia" are likely to be part of it, Peters said.

b.hallenbeck@theday.com