Visitors to downtown Davidson are sometimes surprised when they walk past Main Street Books and notice the three-tiered cart stacked with brown bags of paid-for books waiting for pickup. From inside the store, owner Adah Fitzgerald enjoys watching the reactions. “We hear people say, ‘What?!’ They cannot believe it just sits there all day, safe and sound.”
In this quaint town north of Charlotte, where Davidson College students pledge to an honor code, this trusting practice works just fine. Even when the cart has been accidentally left outside overnight, not a single book has been stolen since the system was instituted in 2020. It’s one of the things Fitzgerald loves about operating this independent bookstore in Davidson’s oldest building, a former general store at 126 S. Main Street.
At 47, the 2001 Davidson graduate has owned the bookstore with her mother, Mary Barone of Houston, TX, since 2015. They bought the business from Betty Reinke and Barbara Freund, who retired after running Main Street Books for 27 years. By the time Fitzgerald bought it, the store was already a beloved institution with lots of regulars. And she loved the location, nestled between the Fifth Third Bank and the popular Summit Coffee. At first, Fitzgerald ran the business in much the same way as the previous owners. She even left the dark stain on the original wide plank pine floor where the general store’s wood stove used to be.
The store had a great selection of books, but Fitzgerald had a different vision. “I wanted the store’s focus to be on recently published books. We’ve done a lot of work to build relationships with publishers and hone our book buying strategy and knowledge.” Things were going well. Then came the Covid pandemic. In March 2020, Fitzgerald had to close the store for a couple of months. Loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program allowed her to continue to pay staff. But they had difficulty selling books because their website wasn’t set up to take online orders. That’s when they started leaving books in the sidewalk cart for pickup by customers who sent orders through Google or called by phone.
In July, Fitzgerald began meeting customers by appointment. Then in 2021, she made the “huge decision” to update her computer to offer a “customer-facing website.’’ Today, new releases get uploaded every night, and customers can order any of them online.That allows Main Street Books to better compete with other booksellers, including Amazon, the online giant and bane of independent bookstores. “Think hard before buying a book from Amazon,” she warned in a 2020 interview with News of Davidson.“Your local shops literally invest in our community… Sales taxes collected from our shop go into local schools and services. Our staff live in our community. Our partnerships with local non-profits put books into the hands of kids who do not have the disposable income to build their own home libraries. Amazon does none of these.”
Owning a bookstore wasn’t always the plan for Adah Walker, who met her husband, Bo Fitzgerald, at Davidson College. She worked as a science teacher at Charlotte Country Day for three years and then spent 10 years teaching middle school and high school science classes at Woodlawn School near Davidson. In 2014, after the birth of their second child, she took a break from teaching. About that time, she saw the announcement that Main Street Books was for sale. Fitzgerald said she and her mother had “playfully talked about owning a coffee shop” one day. Having lived in Davidson before moving to Mooresville, Fitzgerald had been a Summit customer and knew the town didn’t need another coffee shop. But she had “watched what (Summit) had done over 15 to 20 years. So, I knew the potential.”
She liked the idea of owning a business in the heart of town and being part of a growing, thriving community. “Having an established bookstore is really different from starting one from scratch. There was lots to learn. But a very devoted community already,” Fitzgerald says. Today, she employs 15 part-time workers, including store manager Brianne Wik. They are open seven days a week.
Fitzgerald reads about 75 books a year, but some of the employees read 100 to 200 in that time, and they love to give advice about what to read from the 10,000 books in the store. Although its focus is on new releases, the store does not ignore the classics. Displays offer many old, familiar books that have been republished in attractive new packages. From a shelf nearby, for example, Fitzgerald grabs an apple-blossom-covered box that holds the 20th anniversary collector’s edition of Twilight, a cult classic about a romance between a teenage girl and a vampire. Fitzgerald pulls the crisp hardback out of its lush slipcase and flips open the pages to show how the gilded edges transform into pictures of the two main characters, Bella and Edward. “Isn’t it remarkable?” Fitzgerald says of the end-page surprise. “The book as an object has really become a phenomenon.”
Customers regularly pack Main Street Books for author talks and book signings. They sit elbow-to-elbow on folding chairs or stand among the bookshelves that can be rolled back to make space. The store hosts several such events each month, in addition to book club meetings and story hours for children. Among the most famous authors the store has hosted are humorist David Sedaris, chef and restaurateur Vivian Howard, and Jill LePore, a staff writer for the New Yorker and Harvard historian. For Sedaris’ appearance in 2018, Fitzgerald and her staff set up an outdoor sound system so the overflow crowd could hear from the parking lot.
Last summer, Main Street Books was among the first to host Virginia Evans, a debut author from Winston-Salem, whose novel The Correspondent, went on to reach the New York Times’ bestseller list, mostly by word of mouth. “She hadn’t been quite discovered,” Fitzgerald says. “But we kind of knew where she was headed.” The thought makes Fitzgerald smile because, as she often says, it fulfills her goal to build a “place for writers to meet their readers.”
Reach Main Street Books: www.mainstreetbooksdavidson.com; 704-892-6841. Karen Garloch will discuss her debut novel, Stray Voltage, on Sept. 24, from 7-8 p.m., at Main Street Books, 126 S. Main St., Davidson, NC. She will be in conversation with Pam Kelley, author of Money Rock.
Karen Garloch spent forty-five years as a newspaper reporter in Ohio and North Carolina, including thirty years at the Charlotte Observer, where she was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting. Her debut novel, Stray Voltage, won the 2024 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction from Regal House Publishing. A native of Indiana, she graduated from Ball State University, where she is a member of the Journalism Hall of Fame. She and her husband live in Charlotte, North Carolina.
