The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the two “buyout moguls” vying to buy bankrupt bookstore chain Borders in a report by Mike Spector and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg. The story is not without its ironies. As Spector and Trachtenberg note,

Around the time Borders Group Inc. was founded four decades ago, two immigrants who would make their fortunes as buyout moguls arrived in the U.S. from the Middle East. Now, the two rivals represent the struggling bookstore chain’s best hope of avoiding liquidation.

Jahm Najafi and Alec Gores, who hail from Iran and Israel, respectively, are separately negotiating to buy Borders out of bankruptcy proceedings. The veteran investors, whose private-equity firms hunt for distressed assets, are betting they can scoop up a well-known business on the cheap and turn it around at a profit.

Gores, 58 years old, runs the Gores Group, a private equity firm with interest in the financial and entertainment fields, wants to spend $250 million for about 250 of Borders remaining 400 hundred stores, “the bulk of them so-called superstores, which he intends to revamp into more appealing destinations akin to Apple Inc.‘s outlets.” Yes, you heard that right: Gores believes he can turn poor old floundering Borders into a rival for the breathtakingly well run (and stupendously profitable) Apple stores.

Najafi, meanwhile, an owner of the Phoenix Suns basketball team, is better know to publishers because he owns the Book-of-the-Month Club, which he picked up when he also bought the Doubleday Book Club and Columbia House from Bertelsmann AG in 2008. His plan is to take over about 300 Borders stores. And what are his motivations? According to Spector and Trachtenberg, “Najafi could bolster his book clubs by tapping the more than 43 million Borders customers who are members of the chain’s rewards programs and put outposts in the chain’s stores.” Plus, “He believes Borders has a strong brand that retains an attractive base of customers Borders can build on by providing them with additional goods and services, much the way he increased revenue at Network Solutions by offering e-mail and e-commerce capabilities.”

Both bidders, in other words, are looking to sell other than books to a degree that one has to wonder how much they’ll be part of the surviving company.

In any event, a Reuters wire story notes that the company has announced “it was ‘encouraged that’ one of the parties it is presently negotiating with will emerge as the successful buyer on a going concern basis.”

And not a moment too soon: As a Publishers Weekly report notes, the company lost another $35 million last month (which, interestingly, the anonymous PW report seems to think is not so bad).