The South’s Grand Hotel – I’m talking, of course, about The Peabody – was once home to a cozy bookstore called the Three Musketeers. It was founded in 1925, the same year the hotel opened, by three newspapermen — Mallory Chamberlain, Albert Biggs Jr., and Ridley Wills — and I presume they considered themselves the “Three Musketeers.” I can’t think of any other reason for such a name.
These gentlemen actually purchased the stock of a smaller, older shop called Mrs. Dickens Book Shop, which was also located downtown, though I can’t tell you that address at the moment. I’ll have to look into that later.
They opened their store in what the newspapers called “a cubbyhole” on the ground floor of The Peabody. The red “BOOKS” sign marking the entrance was supposedly one of the first neon signs in Memphis.
In the 1930s, a woman named Elizabeth Owen ran the shop, but she moved it to what seems an unlikely location — the Greyhound Bus Terminal a few blocks east on Union – when The Peabody needed the space for a coffee shop.
In 1956, Owen sold the place to Mrs. Fay Dickinson (shown here), who moved it again – this time into the Deluxe Arcade, that L-shaped row of shops on the north side of Madison. The store thrived in that location, drawing patrons from the nearby Sterick, Exchange, and Commerce Title buildings. According to an old Memphis Press-Scimitar article, “At one time Albert Erskine, editor at Random House in New York, was a major stockholder.”
Besides the newest selections, the Three Musketeers offered a basement full of out-of-print books, paintings by local artists, and a complete stock of “social stationery.”
Dickinson ran the shop accompanied by a handsome pair of Siamese cats, which she named Pest II and Nuisance II. According to yet another old newspaper article (I read a lot of those in this history business), the kitty-cats’ favorite titles were Three Blind Mice and To Kill a Mockingbird.
Ha!
Dickinson made the news in the early 1960s by taking a stand against the growing pornography industry, which was threatening bookshops like hers: “I had to run off one grimy little salesman who showed me some dustjackets and tried to tell me, ‘Memphis ought to be a hot market for this stuff,’” she told reporters. “Maybe the police ought to get after this kind of book salesman.”
She seems like a nice person, but her business didn’t endure.In 1965, the Three Musketeers filed for bankruptcy and a few months later, the shop closed.
