Group eyes new bookstore in Booksellers’ location
A group of local investors is completing plans to open a new bookstore where Booksellers at Laurelwood closed in February.
The store will likely have a different name, occupy 10,000 square feet instead of 25,000, and move its front door to face Perkins Extended.
But the bookstore will employ the same core group of experienced staffers, have a restaurant that uses another 3,000 square feet, continue the authors’ book-signing events and children’s programming, and provide a comfortable reading area complete with racks of curated magazines.
If all goes right, the bookstore will open by mid-August, said John Vergos, one of the five organizing investors.
He was among 15 or so potential investors who met at an East Memphis house shortly after news broke in early January that Booksellers would close. The group eventually shrunk to five organizers who are now leading about 20 investors total.
“Our goal was to reopen the bookstore, of course, in the same location with reduced square footage and with a favorable lease, keeping the staff intact and finding a good restaurant operator to take over the restaurant piece, and of course, raise the money,” said Vergos, whose family owns Charlie Vergos Rendezvous restaurant.
The other organizing investors are: Matthew Crow, president of Mercer Capital; Christy Yarbro, a former schoolteacher; Wilson Robbins, who worked at Booksellers as coordinator of the children’s books and children’s area, and Frank Jones, an investor and regional manager for Cumberland Trust.
“I love books; I’ve been around books my whole life,” Robbins said. “... And I don’t want to live somewhere where there’s not a bookstore. I want to live in a city with an independent bookstore.”
Said Jones: “It’s a great Memphis
bookstore that’s been there over 30 years. And it’s a community bookstore that so many people have enjoyed so many years. and we’d just like to see it continued.”
Yarbro recalled being with her sons who were getting a haircut when she read news on her smart phone that Booksellers was closing.
“I said, ‘Boys, we’re going to the bookstore.’ ” Yarbro immediately sought out her friend Robbins in the store and encouraged her to write down the names and phone numbers of everyone, who like Yarbro, who expressed an interest saving the bookstore.
That was the start of the investor organizing group.
Since then, the five have called friends and others who might be interested in investing, met with the bookstore’s staff and landlord of Laurelwood Shopping Center, picked the brains of other bookstore owners in the region and mined information from the American Booksellers Association.
Vergos credited the shopping center’s landlord for its support and for providing “favorable” lease terms.
Cory Prewitt, Laurelwood’s chief operating officer, said, “We have a really good group of just fantastic Memphians who are doing the right thing and we’re trying to do our best to help facilitate that. And it seems like we’re really, really close” to completing the deal.
Other prospective tenants expressed interest in the Booksellers’ space, but the shopping center’s priority was to land another bookstore, Prewitt said.
“It was obvious from the response by the community; we all know it was important,” he said. “When you hear about people literally crying about the store closing, if that doesn’t affect you as a landlord, I don’t know what can.”
Prewitt has even helped with gap employment for some Booksellers employees by encouraging other Laurelwood stores to fill any openings with them and by hiring them to deal with inventory left over from the closed bookstore.
Vergos declined to say how much the investors have raised, but expressed confidence the group is close to having enough money.
“We feel like we’re going to raise sufficient capital not to bootstrap this thing, but to open a quality bookstore.”
The store started as Davis-Kidd Booksellers, kept the name despite being acquired by the Joseph-Beth Booksellers chain in 1997, but changed names to Booksellers at Laurelwood in 2010 when Joseph-Beth went bankrupt.
Vergos echoed what the former Booksellers’ owner had said: Despite the growing trend of online retail, rightsized independent bookstores are succeeding across the nation.
“There is a sweet spot for independent bookstores,” Vergos said. “Amazon is not running everybody out of business.”