In Memoriam--Davis-Kidd Booksellers, Nashville, TN

The announcement just hit the news today.

After serving Nashville for thirty years, Davis-Kidd Booksellers is closing its doors.

Cincinnati-based Joseph-Beth Group, which purchased the business from founders Karen Davis and Thelma Kidd in 1997, today announced the closure of the store, located in the Mall at Green Hills, as it filed a Chapter 11 reorganization petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court at Lexington, Ky.

"Davis-Kidd has been an institution in Nashville. It breaks my heart to have to close this store," said Neil Van Uum, owner of The Joseph-Beth Group, in a prepared statement.

The announcement said inventory liquidation sales will begin in mid-November, continuing until the store closes in December.

Founded by Karen and Thelma in a small location in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville in 1980, back when that part of town was its own small town--brick ranches, everybody in a church, the local public high school, the local private girl's school, the Green Hills shopping center, the locally owned grocery, the little YMCA. Before it was discovered, and the cheap money flooded in, and the MacMansions started going up, and the mall was built and expanded, and the traffic jams of late model cars carrying ladies with lately-reconfigured faces and and other body parts took over...before it became GREEN HILLS!!!, you know?

OS visited on one of its first days in business, and was hooked. It was quiet, friendly, with benches to sit on; and it was obvious the owners loved books, loved their customers, and loved the business they were in. They built it, moved it to larger digs across the street, built it again, and sold it in 1997.

Good for them. The American Dream. OS hopes they made a killing.

The book retailing world is now unrecognizable from those sleepy pre-Amazon, pre-cable news, pre-TalkRadio, pre-internet days. Add a huge recession, stir vigorously.

It was a real whocoodanode situation for the new owners, and only sympathy goes out to them.

And to all of us, who love books, and bookstores with owners who love books and customers.

Here's hoping, as the mess shakes out, that some 20-something with sufficient capital, business savvy, and the same drive as Karen and Thelma will find a winning recipe for book retailing in OS's hometown.

That, by the way, is what the bankruptcy law is for--to wind down failed businesses in as orderly a fashion as possible, and open the door for new ventures.  Someone, please make sure Washington gets the memo, lest someone attempt to revive the expired patient with a transfusion of tax dollars.