Dallas Bookstores — 1974
by Paula Bosse
Aldredge Book Store, 2506 Cedar Springs
by Paula Bosse
Today is my father’s birthday. Dick Bosse. I always try to post something bookstore-related on May 22 in his honor.
In the early 1970s, the Aldredge Book Store moved from its original location in an old house on McKinney Avenue (2800 McKinney) to a strip of shops on Cedar Springs (2506 Cedar Springs at Fairmount). Later (early ’80s?) it moved to its final location at 2909 Maple Avenue. My father worked there his entire adult life, starting as a bookseller during his SMU days and ending up as the owner of the store which he ran until his death in 2000.
When the store was on Cedar Springs, he was the manager. It was a weird, long, thin store with lots of rooms opening off a hallway painted bright yellow (my retinas!). The most impressive room was the one at the back, where all the expensive books were. A huge window looked out onto a hidden, sunken courtyard. The photo at the top shows one of the walls of bookcases. The photo below shows my father in 1974 in a staged pose looking uncharacteristically serious in that same room — straight ahead of him was the very pretty courtyard (I wonder if it’s still there?).
I spent so much time there that I can still remember where everything was. This was back when that used to be a cool, funky neighborhood. The Quadrangle was nearby, but I always got lost in what felt like a torturous maze of shops. I preferred the Sample House, where I spent as much time as I could. (That store — in a creaky old — house was one of my favorite childhood haunts. Again, I remember where absolutely everything was.)
I stumbled across an ad from 1946 with a photo of the Cedar Springs building in it — at the time it was being “completely reconditioned and restyled” — I’m surprised to learn that that building is so old (see it today on Google Street View here). (I’m not sure what’s going on with that address in the ad, but this building is definitely in the 2500 block of Cedar Springs.)
March, 1946
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The reason I know the picture of my father is from 1974 is because it appeared in a Dallas Chamber of Commerce magazine article about Dallas bookstores, published in December, 1974 — the lengthy article was titled “Books, Bookstores, Book Lovers” by Colleen O’Connor, with photos by Jack Caspary. It profiled several of the city’s major booksellers of the day, including Henry Taylor of Preston Books (soon to become Taylor Books/Taylor’s), Ken Gjemre of Half-Price Books (which was then an empire of only four stores), Pat Miers of The Bookseller, Bill Gilliland of Doubleday (late of McMurray’s), and Larry Snyder of Cokesbury. When the article came out, Dallas was “fifth in the country for per capita [book] sales.” So many bookstores!
The author misidentified Sawnie Aldredge, the original owner of the Aldredge Book Store, as “Sonny” and somehow managed to pull some quotes from my father which make him sound like a pretentious snob (which he definitely was NOT), but it’s a great look at a time when Dallas had tons of bookstores — even though my father might not have been overly impressed with some of them when he said, “Unfortunately, the majority of bookstores today are ‘schlock shops’ that sell Snoopy dolls and Rod McKuen” (now that sounds like him!).
I’ve scanned the entire article which you can read here.
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Sources & Notes
More Flashback Dallas posts on The Aldredge Book Store can be found here.
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Copyright © 2020 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
” including Henry Taylor of Preston Books (soon to become Taylor Books/Taylor’s),’ Martha Taylor was the founder, Henry came in after being the administrator of the Medical Arts Hospital. He couldn’t care less about books, his model was to have a bookstore that was like Elliott’s Hardware. He wanted at least one copy of every book possible. He didn’t want to hire people who liked books. He always said you sell books like nuts and bolts
One of the secrets behind Taylor’s was Steve Matthews the book-buyer. he took a gamble and ordered 600 copies of Roots. Henry about had a stroke, but when the show came out and the books flew out of the store he would say “I knew that would be a best seller” Steve later left Taylor moved to Austin and came up with the Bookstop concept.
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I remember Aldredge bookstore having a couple of cats. While I love books, I shopped there mostly because to see the cats.
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You weren’t the only one! The last of the bookstore cats was Howard, a big black cat who lounged wherever he wanted and has a faithful fanbase.
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And those cats pooped a lot!
I loved your father.
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On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 9:16 PM Flashback : Dallas wrote:
> Paula Bosse posted: “Aldredge Book Store, 2506 Cedar Springs by Paula > Bosse Today is my father’s birthday. Dick Bosse. I always try to post > something bookstore-related on May 22 in his honor. In the early 1970s, the > Aldredge Book Store moved from its original location in an o” >
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Paula,
My first job out of college was at a downtown bank, where I discovered I hated office work. My second job was at B. Dalton Bookseller in Valley View in 1973. It was indeed a schlock bookstore, but it was the source of my new career and where I met my husband. I moved up to Brentano’s, then G. K. Harris Wholesale. I later managed a Waldenbooks in Longview, Half-Price in the late 90’s, and finally ended up at the Richardson Border’s right before it closed. I’d be amazed if we haven’t sold books to one another at some point over the decades. The first book I ever bought (The Golden Book of Myths and Legends with illustrations by the Provensens) was from House of Books in Preston Royal in about 1962. My father was a printer, so I’ve sort of been addicted to the smell of ink and paper since early childhood. It wasn’t until I inherited my Grandmother’s library that I realized that her father, who was general manager of Sanger Bros. until his death in 1912, was also the book buyer. It is in the DNA.
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Very cool! People don’t realize how small and interconnected the book world is. In addition to my father, my mother *also* worked at the Aldredge Book Store (that’s where they met), my brother has worked at various bookstores (Borders and Half Price in Fort Worth), and I owned my own store for a while and also worked at Bookstop (on Mockingbird) and Borders (Preston Royal, which I helped open and where I worked for YEARS). I set up the Texana sections at all the Texas stores, including the Spanish Village store when it opened. We probably *have* sold books to each other at some point! (And I’ve certainly sold my share of sideline “schlock,” which generally has a higher profit margin than a book does!)
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In the mid 1950s, when I was in my early teens, a couple of friends and I would catch a bus from our Preston Hollow neighborhood and spend all day in downtown Dallas. We would spend the morning browsing through the piles of used paperbacks (10 cents each) on the cavernous second floor of Harper’s Bookstore in Deep Ellum, eat lunch at one of the hole-in-the wall downtown cafés, and catch a movie in the afternoon (there were more than a dozen theaters in downtown Dallas). Over the course of several years, I accumulated a library of perhaps 500 paperbacks, almost all of them bought from Harper’s; I had my entire collection catalogued on index cards, cross referenced by title and author, with a brief précis of each. Those were the “halcyon days of yore!”
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Another great post and thanks for including the scanned article. Good stuff!
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Thanks, Greg!
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