Sitting underneath a bookshelf in the bright, airy front room of the Globe Bookstore and Coffeehouse, Michael Homann, the balding German with an aquiline nose who bought the storied café three years ago, is clear about his intentions.

"I don't want to be the one to destroy this place," he says with a subtle accent.

The problem is, he might not have much choice. For the past 10 months, Homann, 54, has been trying unsuccessfully to sell the Globe, partly because he wants to return to Munich but also because it is losing money. If he doesn't find a buyer by September, it will be shut down.

When Homann bought the Globe in March 2003, he took over a "Prague institution," as many guidebooks refer to it, but also a business that was losing more than $200 (4,400 Kč) a day. He bought it anyway, partly out of appreciation for the tradition behind Prague's first expatriate literary hub.

In its 13-year history, the Globe has served both as a vital meeting point for English-speaking foreigners and a center of the English-language literary world, hosting readings by internationally renowned writers such as Gore Vidal, Allen Ginsberg and Ivan Klíma.

Homann wanted the Globe to live on. And now, at a time when its near monopoly as a home for Prague's displaced expatriate community has disappeared, he's hoping to find someone willing to do the same.

"If we don't sell it," he says, "we have to destroy this place."

Its chances don't look good. Of the people who've expressed interest in buying the Globe, all have backed off after Homann told them it's losing $120 a day, less than when he bought it but still a considerable amount.

Homann is nevertheless convinced it could turn a profit and blames himself for the state it's in now.

"Everything you should not do, I did," he says.

The list of indictments Homann levels upon himself is long. It includes throwing people out of the café when they drink more than three beers, making zero effort to interact with the business community to bring in lucrative parties and events, and cutting costs, mostly on personnel, by more than 60 percent since 2003.

"We only have one waiter now, so the service isn't good when there's a full house — so there's never a full house."

He also places part of the blame on The Prague Post. In 2003, Post Founding Editor-In-Chief Alan Levy wrote a profile of Homann that identified him as a "(self described) '51-year-old gay man'" in the first sentence.

After that, Homann says, the Globe saw a considerable drop in American clientele: "It was quite obvious."

While it's more likely the café's troubles stem from market conditions and management missteps than homophobia, there's more to it than that.

'A sigh of relief'

When the Globe was opened by five partners — three of whom worked at The Prague Post — in a cozy, intimate space in Prague 7–Holešovice in 1993, it was one of the only places English-speaking foreigners and tourists could meet, find books they could read and order good coffee.

Though it became the victim of occasional police raids, thanks to the skeptical eye of Prague 7 locals, the Globe evolved, more or less, into the heart of these bohemian foreigners' community.

"It was a contact point for the expat community, particularly the American expat community, but English-speaking," says Kip Bauersfeld, who's lived in Prague on and off since the early '90s and was a manager at the Globe in 1996. "When it first opened, it was a great sigh of relief for people because you didn't have a place where you could openly meet to speak English."

The Globe's real significance was as a point for information exchange, Bauersfeld says. Expats could go there to get help finding apartments, work and other necessities.

The population of Prague's native English-speaking community has stayed at about the same level since then — there were 3,490 Americans legally registered in the Czech Republic in 1994 compared with 3,952 last year, according to the Czech Statistical Office, though most reliable estimates put the actual number at around three times that.

But the places for them to meet and mix, meanwhile, have multiplied.

Foreign residents and tourists can now choose from dozens of English-friendly venues, including Jama, Bohemia Bagel, Shakespeare and Sons and Anagram bookstore. And the Internet, with sites like expats.cz and prague.tv, removed any necessity to leave home to find listings for apartments, roommates or an American coffeemaker.

"There was an information explosion," Bauersfeld says. "So that made the Globe's original purpose redundant."

And then the café/bookstore isn't exactly a great business model in the best of environments. Like many of its kind, the Globe has never been lucrative, and faces unique obstacles in Prague.

"Owning a bookstore is a difficult thing to do anywhere," says Bryn Perkins, managing director of media company Monitor CE and a former partner at Shakespeare and Sons, an English-language bookstore with two locations in Prague. "Owning an English bookstore here is more difficult because there's not much demand out there."

And putting a café inside a bookstore doesn't make it more sustainable, he says. The margins will always be low, and because of that, it's very difficult to advertise to a very small market that's being chopped up by a growing number of competitors.

"Maintaining a good bookstore is a constant struggle," he says. "Owning a bookstore is a labor of love. It's a great job for someone who is retired and doesn't have to really worry about whether he had a good or a bad year."

'A force from above'

In 2000, the Globe moved from Prague 7 to a less intimate space in Prague 1, where it is now. Many observers say the move cost the Globe much of its original, well-worn appeal.

"It seemed like it died in one sense," Bauersfeld says. "A lot of people never felt as attached to the new location."

Three years later, Scott and Marketa Rogers, the last two of the original owners, sold it to Homann, who'd moved to Prague from Munich after selling his taxi company, for approximately 4 million Kč.

Today, the Globe has a lot working against it; its 120,000 Kč monthly rent possibly the most critical factor. While its demise might be inevitable, it's passing, if it comes to that, won't go unnoticed.

"It's definitely a pity if the Globe is forced to close down," says Klíma, the author of Judge on Trial who's given several readings at the café over the years. "I used to go there to buy books I couldn't get anywhere else. If this was some kind of political problem, then writers could offer their help. But with financial problems, you know how it is, a force from above, so to say."

Homann, of course, understands this, which is why he's willing to sell the Globe for as much as he could get for the inventory: around 2 million Kč.

For him, the Globe was always a hobby, but, he says, it needs someone who cares about the economic and hospitality sides of the business, two things he was not interested in.

Homann wants to be back in Munich by winter and thinks it must be possible to find a buyer before September.

He just may pull it off. During the interview, a man from Indiana who'd been told by a friend to visit the Globe during his trip to Prague interrupted.

He'd been listening to the discussion, he said, and thought the same person who recommended the Globe, an American entrepreneur, might want to buy.