For all the elevated speculation that maybe the book business would weather the storm this lackluster Christmas season — by proving to be the more inexpensive yet tasteful gift to give — sales figures coming in this week are bringing everyone back down to earth with a resounding thud. On Tuesday, Borders not only fired its top executives, including the CEO and CFO (see the earlier MobyLives report), but revealed why when it released its sales figures for the nine weeks leading up to Christmas: Sales at Borders stores fell 11.7%; at the company’s superstores they fell 13.6%; and at its Waldenbooks stores they fell a whopping 16.4%, as this story on Shelf Awareness reports. In a press release late Wednesday, Barnes & Noble revealed that although it wasn’t quite the devastating disaster predicted by chairman Len Riggio back in early November (see the earlier MobyLives report) … it wasn’t great, either. Store sales were down 5.2%, and online sales at Barnesandnoble.com were down 11%, for the nine week holiday period.

It wasn’t just the chains that were suffering, either. One of the country’s leading indie bookstores, the Tattered Cover in Denver, laid off ten people yesterday. “Our story is very similar . . . to the stories you’re hearing out there,” owner Joyce Meskis tells the Denver Post in this report. (Meskis is referring, of course, to the rest of the retail world — see, for example, this AP report about the Macy’s department store chain, where holiday sales were so bad they’re closing 11 stores). And a wrap-up in Bookselling This Week by Karen Schechner and David Grogan includes reports from leading American indies, from The Northshire in Vermont to the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. It concludes that while some stores fared better than expected, the overall trend was toward “significant” losses.

And the effects of the financial crisis aren’t just wracking booksellers—they’re hitting book-related businesses, too, and hard: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports in this story that seven out of the eight people working at the popular tourist attraction honoring the author of Gone with the Wind, the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, were fired yesterday … showing how the crisis is impacting the pursuit of literary interests however vague they may be.