City Life
It was the late ’70s in Nashville, and Thelma Kidd and Karen Davis were a pair of thirtysomething social workers intent on doing good deeds. Both were counselors—Kidd worked at Family and Children’s Services, and Davis was at Planned Parenthood—but in their spare time, they dreamed of doing other things.
In general terms, they talked about “doing something on our own” and “being our own bosses.” When they got specific, though, they talked about opening a bookstore. They envisioned it as a different kind of bookstore—a place where customers could sit down on a bench, thumb through a magazine, and feel comfortable. It would be, they told their friends, “a gathering place,” a small community.
On paper, neither Kidd nor Davis seemed well-suited for the task. Neither had ever worked in a bookstore. And neither of them had ever run a business. Yet they found themselves approaching bankers and asking for a $175,000 loan. “To say we put a business plan together...,” says Davis. Then she pauses, and Kidd completes the sentence: “Well, let’s just say we jotted down some projections. What we really had was a scrapbook that we would show people, and it had pictures of bookstores that we liked.”
In 1980 a bank—Commerce Union Bank, which is now NationsBank—finally came through with the $175,000. Ninety percent of the loan was guaranteed to the bank by the Small Business Administration, in part because Kidd and Davis were women. Each woman put in $25,000 of her own money. And they were in business. Davis-Kidd Booksellers was born.
Over the better part of the next two decades, Kidd and Davis proceeded to build one of the city’s most imaginative, most popular, and most successful retail establishments. They would expand to three other Tennessee cities, where they would repeat their Nashville success story. By sponsoring countless lectures, poetry readings, and book-signings, Davis-Kidd emerged as an influential player in Southern literary circles. And its two owners gained immense respect in local business circles, not just as entrepreneurs, but as women entrepreneurs.
But over the years Davis and Kidd accomplished something much more important, something that seemed, on the face of it, much more simple. Their store became a hangout, a gathering place for Nashville’s real or imagined intelligentsia. Davis-Kidd became a sort of town square where people gathered, not around the courthouse but around a stack of books.
Seventeen years after their first store opened, Davis and Kidd announced plans last week to sell the business to Neil and Mary Beth Van Uum. The Van Uums are founders of Joseph-Beth Booksellers, a Davis-Kidd-like operation with stores in Lexington and Cincinnati.
Kidd and Davis won’t say how much they were paid for their stores. Nor will they say how much money they made last year. What Davis does say is that she plans to relax, and to concentrate on her small walking-tour business, which leads excursions to the British Isles and Mexico. Kidd says she has some ideas about her own future, but mostly she’s hoping for downtime.
War of the words
It is clearly an understatement to say that Kidd and Davis have done nicely for themselves, and for the local book business. The last two decades have witnessed a virtual revolution in book-selling in Nashville. More often than not, Davis and Kidd haven’t just stayed ahead of the explosion. They’ve been there lighting the fuse.
Two decades ago, Nashville was still a city with a number of locally owned bookstores, the most successful of which were Mills’ and Zibart’s. Now nearly all of those stores are gone, and except for Davis-Kidd, the town’s biggest booksellers belong to national chains. Stores like Bookstar and Barnes & Noble have lots of money with which to compete, and they create an environment that is a lot more costly, a lot more risky, and a lot more razzle-dazzle.
In 1980, Nashville was not known for its imaginative retail, and it seems ironic that the exception to the rule would turn out to be something as banal as a bookstore. But Davis and Kidd understood what many other bookstore owners did not understand. They knew that buying a book is a process to be savored; it is not simply a task to be accomplished. Kidd says she and Davis wanted customers to be able to buy books in a place that was “warm, welcoming, and safe.” Davis says they knew that, “if we could get someone in the store for the first time, we would get them back again.”
Unlike many other booksellers in town, Davis and Kidd spent time wondering what colors they would paint the walls. They pondered how far apart the shelves should be. They tried to get the ambiance right.
On Oct. 28, 1980, in a 3,500-square-foot space across Hillsboro Road from the store’s present flagship location in Grace’s Plaza, Davis and Kidd opened their first shop. They scuttled their original plan to call the store “Kidd-Davis Booksellers,” fearing that name would suggest a prizefighter. But their aim remained the same. They wanted to mix business and pleasure, reading and chatting, strolling and repose. The place was meant to be commercial. But in the air, Davis and Kidd nurtured a sense of companionship, community, sociability.
Benches were positioned near the aisles between bookshelves. At the time, that concept alone was “revolutionary,” Davis says. Tables were placed outside, piled high with sale-price “remaindered” books. Customers were allowed to browse, wander, think. There were cake-baking contests. And there was a kids’ section, an innovation unheard of in local bookstores. “All of these things helped make it a gathering place,” Davis says. “And here, the social work part of our histories is related, because this business is about people, and we both like people.”
From the outset, the store had no problem meeting its sales projections. But the naysayers would not be silenced. With only 13 parking spots, Davis and Kidd were told they’d never get enough customers. They were told they were on the wrong side of Hillsboro Road, that they wouldn’t attract real browsers, the people who had time to kill as they traveled out of town from downtown. Others still found the name problematic: Because it had “Kidd” in it, some people actually thought the store was only for children.
Worst of all, Davis and Kidd say, was the feeling among some local skeptics that they weren’t truly committed to the business because they were women. “They saw it as a whim, as a hobby. They thought we’d stop,” Kidd recalls.
Nonetheless, a number of other factors were decidedly in their favor. Fortuitously, the opening of the store coincided with daily delivery of The New York Times to Nashville. As the store began carrying the paper, new customers, hungry for that day’s Times fix, began making obligatory visits to Davis-Kidd. Better yet, Kidd and Davis decided to keep the store open seven days a week, and well into the night, something no other bookstore in town was doing. “People needed things to do, and coming to Davis-Kidd was something they could do,” Davis says. In a time before coffeehouses, their store became a late-night crossroads for intellectual types.
Bound for glory
In March of 1983, Green Hills Mall contacted Davis and Kidd to ask if they would be interested in crossing the street and occupying a much larger facility. With that move, their space nearly tripled.
“Some people didn’t want the store to grow,” Kidd says. “They were afraid we would lose the coziness, the intimacy.” To lessen the shock of the move for customers, they made careful plans. “We kept the same colors on the walls, the same fixtures, the same shelves,” says Davis.
The extra space of the new store gave business a boost. “It gave us the opportunity to have new things,” Davis says. “This was when we started story-telling festivals. We added greeting cards. We enlarged the kids’ section and did regular kids’ programs.”
Soon the store was generating a fair amount of profit. In 1985 Davis and Kidd decided to expand; they opened a Davis-Kidd store in Memphis. A Knoxville store followed in 1986, and the Memphis store expanded in 1988. That same year the Nashville Davis-Kidd moved into a huge new home in Grace’s Plaza and added a restaurant. The company opened a final store in Jackson, Tenn., in 1995.
“We’ve always had an organic approach to business, about doing what just seemed right,” says Davis. “We have never really done things based on what kind of money we were making,” adds Kidd.
One of the pitfalls of entrepreneurship is that the more a person builds a business, the more removed she becomes from the actual business itself. She has less and less contact with the part of the job that is her passion.
It has been years since either Kidd or Davis operated a cash register and had the chance to engage a customer in small-talk about a great book, either one that’s just been published or one that’s long gone from the shelves. That development, they will tell you, is a downside to their success.
“At that very first bookstore,” Davis says, “I always dealt with customers. Customers are great teachers. I have missed learning from them.”
Kidd says, “The truth is that, if you want to do this business right, you really need to give it 1000 percent, and I’ve become tired of that. I have really not been giving it the attention it needs.”
Davis and Kidd talk about their store as if it were another person, as if it were something they gave birth to, nurtured along, and developed into young adulthood. “We gave it guidance, and now it’s just the right time to let it go,” Kidd says.
“And knowing when to let it go is hard,” Davis says. “The business is 17 years old. It’s time.”
