Jim and Connye run The Published Page, a Texas ‘old school’ bookshop in Cleburne. Both partners in life and in business, they are proud owners of approximately 80,000 books and 20,000 comics, vinyl records, and CD’s… and that’s only counting what they have cataloged.
A Labor of Love
As part of a series about small businesses in North Texas, the Harts sat down to ‘open the book’ on what it takes to run a used bookstore these days. It took six months to open The Published Page after it was purchased. Jim Hart said it had a hand-painted ‘for sale’ sign in the door, and a car had driven through one of the windows. It had a lot of problems.
When talking about their customers, Jim Hart said he considers anyone 70 or under young, but most of their customer base are actually young people. ‘They’re probably under 40, which I think is just great,’ he said. ‘People who come in here and tell me, almost bragging, well, I haven’t read a thing since I got out of college… I’m sorry, your nose is running too, but you don’t have to tell me about it.’ In the nine years of The Published Page being in business, they’ve sold just over 100,000 books.
‘That’s 100,000 books that are in somebody’s hands and an awful lot of them, if we weren’t here, might be in landfills,’ Jim Hart said. The inside of the bookshop could be described as organized chaos. Large stacks of books cover much of the floor, making tunnels for customers to both walk through and explore.
‘People who really like books, though, it doesn’t bother them,’ Connye Hart said. ‘They think, ‘oh, let me see that one back there.’ They’ll dig through the stacks.’ When Jim and Connye decide to ‘cut back to half days,’ they aren’t 100% sure who’s hands the bookstore will fall in to. They just hope The Published Page will always be there for book lovers alike.
‘We have a couple of grandkids that someday might be interested,’ Connye Hart said. ‘They haven’t really come forward yet, but it would be nice if they’d come in and take it over. But we’ll worry about that when it happens, and if it doesn’t happen, that’s okay too. Somebody else might want to take it over at some point.’
Original reporting: Fort Worth Report — read the source article.
