Printed Page Bookshop

Printed Page Bookshop Warm, inviting independent Denver used book store offering book collecting classes, buy/sell used bo We look forward to seeing you soon!

Printed Page Bookshop is one of Denver’s hidden treasures - a friendly used book store tucked away in a charming Victorian house along antique row on South Broadway. You'll find a warm and inviting haven for book-lovers boasting a huge variety of used books, antiquarian, book collections, and hard-to-find collectibles from more than 20 booksellers. We also offer book collecting classes, we buy use

d books, and we even have an awesome Children's section. Swing by, pull up a comfy chair, meet our dog, Lola, and see what you can find!

06/07/2026

This Week's Puzzler

On June 7, 1967, this woman died at age 73 in New York City. A lifelong New Yorker, she was born as Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 in Long Branch, New Jersey (her parents owned a summer cottage there). Later in life, she joked that her parents got her back to Manhattan as soon as they could after Labor Day in order to make her a true New Yorker.

She had a difficult and unhappy childhood. She was only five when her mother died, and when her father remarried a few years later, she showed her contempt for her stepmother by referring to her as “The housekeeper.” Her sharp tongue got her into trouble a few years later when she attended a parochial elementary school. Recalling those years as an adult, she said she never fit in and was considered a disruptive influence by the nuns. She was finally asked to leave when she began referring to the Immaculate Conception as spontaneous combustion.

She first thought about becoming a writer in adolescence and went on to have a career that could be described as almost meteoric. In 1914, at age 21, she sold her first poem to Vanity Fair. A few months later, she was hired as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine. During her two years at Vogue, she showed signs of the exceptional wit that would later characterize her entire career—like this famous caption she wrote for an article on women’s undergarments:

“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

In 1918, at age 23, she became a drama critic for Vanity Fair magazine, where she quickly developed a reputation for her acerbic pen. Fired after three years for an overly caustic review, she began a successful writing career, producing best-selling books of light verse as well as nonfiction. In 1927, she began writing for The New Yorker, an association she would maintain the rest of her professional life.

Along with Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, and other New York wits, she was a charter member of the famed Algonquin Round Table. In a favorite Round Table game called “I Can Give You a Sentence,” someone would toss out an unusual word and challenge the others to use it in a sentence. One night, someone suggested the word “horticulture.” After a moment’s silence, she hollered out, “I’ve got one!” Her creation that night went on to become one of her most celebrated remarks:

“You may lead a w***e to culture, but you can’t make her think.”

Even though she was a petite woman with a demure appearance, she had a rapier wit. Alexander Woollcott once described her as “a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.” And critic John Mason Brown said of her: “To those she did not like, she was a stiletto made of sugar.”

Who was this woman?

05/31/2026

This Week's Puzzler

On June 3, 1936, this man was born in Wichita Falls, Texas (he died at age 84 on March 25, 2021). He grew up on a ranch just outside Archer City, Texas, but never took to the cowboy life. In 1942, at age six, he began dipping into a carton of cheap adventure novels that had been dropped off at his home by a cousin who’d been drafted into the Army. Soon infected with a love of reading, he ultimately found a home in the literary world, and ultimately graduated with a degree in English Literature from the University of North Texas in 1958.

After receiving an M.A. degree from Rice University in 1960, he, Ken Kesey, and several other aspiring writers were awarded a Stanford University fellowship to study under Wallace Stegner. It was at Stanford where he put the finishing touches on a novel he’d been working on since his college days—the story of a self-absorbed, alienated, and womanizing cowboy. The novel was finally published in 1961 as Horseman, Pass By, and later adapted into the 1963 movie Hud, starring Paul Newman. Over the next two decades, he wrote a number of other acclaimed novels that were also made into popular films, including The Last Picture Show (1966), Terms of Endearment (1975), and Lonesome Dove (1985).

The Lonesome Dove backstory is also quite interesting. A captivating tale about retired Texas Rangers who decide to herd cattle for a living, it was originally written as a screenplay in the early 1970s by this week’s Mystery Man and Peter Bogdanovich. The two men had collaborated on the screenplay for the 1971 film The Last Picture Show, and they enjoyed the experience so much they decided to give it another whirl.

The screenplay was well received by studio execs, but the two writers were so vehemently opposed to the aging actors being considered for the starring roles—Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, and John Wayne—that they backed out of the deal. For the next dozen years, the screenplay languished “in development” before our Mystery Man finally purchased the rights and adapted it into a novel.

Once published, Lonesome Dove was a critical and commercial success, ultimately winning the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1989, CBS adapted it into an acclaimed television miniseries, starring two far more age-appropriate protagonists: Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones.

Who was this man?

05/24/2026

A reminder before we get to this week's Puzzler: Printed Page is open Memorial Day.

This Week's Puzzler

On May 28, 2014, this American poet died at age 86 in her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. At her death, tributes poured in from all over the world, including messages from Presidents Obama, Clinton, and Bush (44). A Time magazine obituary was aply titled: “A Hymn to Endurance.”

Born St. Louis in 1928 as Marguerite Ann Johnson, she was only 3 when her parents divorced and she was sent to live with her grandmother. At age 8, she was molested by her mother’s boyfriend, a trauma that left her mute for nearly five years. She testified against her abuser in court, but a few days before his sentencing, he was beaten to death by unknown assailants.

As she approached puberty, a teacher introduced her to the writings of Shakespeare, Dickens, and such prominent African-American writers as James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Even though her developing love of literature greatly expanded her thinking, she continued to struggle in her personal life. A single mother living in poverty, she even, for a brief time, resorted to prostitution and petty crime. Nearing age 30, she moved to New York City, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and came under the tutelage of James Baldwin. In 1969, she burst on the cultural scene with a bestselling memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Who was this woman?

05/17/2026

This Week's Puzzler

On May 19, 1941, this woman was born in New York City, the first of four daughters born to two East Coast screenwriters who headed to California in 1945 to pursue careers in the film industry. All four girls were raised in an intellectually stimulating but psychologically challenging environment. And given their mother’s favorite saying —“Everything is copy”—it is not surprising that all four girls went on to pursue writing careers.

An exceptional student at Beverly Hills High School, she was thrilled when she was accepted at Wellesley College in 1958. Not surprisingly, she majored in journalism and served as editor of the school’s newspaper. The highlight of her college career was serving as an intern in JFK’s White House in 1961, a subject she wrote about over forty years later in a 2003 New York Times article that was cleverly titled, “All the President’s Girls.” In that piece, she wrote:

“It has become horribly clear to me that I am probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House whom the president did not make a pass at.”

And then, after speculating on the many possible reasons the President didn’t make a pass at her—including her bad permanent wave, her wardrobe, and her Jewishness—she concluded:

“On the other hand, perhaps it’s simply because J.F.K. somehow sensed that discretion was not my middle name. I mean, I assure you if anything had gone on between the two of us, you would not have had to wait this long to find it out.”

After graduating from Wellesley in 1962, she worked for the New York Post for five years before turning to what she called “magazine journalism,” writing essays and articles for Esquire, New York, and other magazines. Her very first novel was Heartburn (1983), a book inspired by her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein (and later adapted into a 1986 film).

After two unsuccessful attempts at matrimony, she finally found marital happiness with crime writer Nick Pileggi, who she married in 1987. They were together when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2006—and he was at her side when she died at age 71 in 2012. A eulogy in The New York Times described her as “The Queen of Quips.”

As an essayist, she wrote scores of humorous—and often hilarious—pieces, many gathered together in bestselling books, like Wallflower at the O**y (1970), Crazy Salad (1975), I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006), and I Remember Nothing (2012). But she will be forever remembered for an extraordinary screenwriting career that included the films “Silkwood” (1983), “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), and “You’ve Got Mail” (1998).

Who was this woman?

05/10/2026

This Week's Puzzler (another easy one!)

On May 11, 1894, this woman was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (now a part of Pittsburgh). In 1908, at age 14, she moved with her family to Santa Barbara, California. Three years later, at age 17, she was mesmerized by the first dance performance she’d ever seen—with Ruth St. Denis as the featured performer. Just like that, she was captivated by the world of dance, and especially by the emerging forms of “modern dance” that were struggling to get recognized as a legitimate alternative to classical ballet.

In her early twenties, she moved to Los Angeles to study at the “Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts,” founded by dancing pioneers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. She studied there for nearly eight years, and later in life would say, “Everything I did was influenced by Denishawn.” In 1926, she ushered in a whole new era in the history of dance when she established her own studio in New York City. The studio continues to operate today.

Who was this woman?

05/03/2026

This Week's Puzzler (an easy one)

On May 9, 1981, this man died at age 72—of a sudden heart attack—at his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York. A New York Times obituary the next day reported that Ernest Hemingway had been asked a few decades earlier to name the best American writers of the era. He quickly answered “Faulkner,” and then, after a pause, mentioned this week’s Mystery Man.

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1909, he was only three when he moved with his parents to a predominantly Jewish working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side (his father was an auto mechanic and his mother the sole proprietor of a candy store). Educated in Chicago’s public schools, he was an exceptional student who went on graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1931.

In 1933, just as he was beginning his career as a writer, he was arrested for stealing a typewriter from a Texas university. While never formally convicted, he was held in jail for nearly five months, and the entire experience, according to one biographer, was pivotal in forging his deep connection to America’s underclass.

While he won his first of three O. Henry awards for a 1935 short story, most of his work in the 1930s was forgettable. He was beginning to make a name for himself with Never Come Morning—a 1942 novel that Ernest Hemingway liked—when he was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army. His first taste of literary success came in 1947, when The Neon Wilderness, his first short-story collection, received an award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He will be forever remembered, however, for two novels: The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), a National Book Award winner, and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). Both books were adapted into popular films. His novels and short stories so powerfully portrayed the lives of drunks, junkies, gamblers, prostitutes, and street hustlers that critic Leslie Fielder called him “The bard of the stumblebum.”

Who was this man?

04/26/2026

This Week's Puzzler

On April 30, 1945, this woman was born as Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (she turns 81 this week). The oldest of three daughters, she was fifteen when her baby sister started calling her by a nickname that she liked so much she ultimately adopted it as her own.

A lifelong reader and exceptional student, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hollins College (now Hollins University) in 1967. She stayed on a year longer to get her M.A. degree, writing her master’s thesis on Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 classic Walden.

After graduation, she spent the first few years writing, keeping a journal, trying her hand at oil painting, and working in the Johnson administration’s anti-poverty program. In 1973, following Thoreau’s example, she moved to a small cabin on the banks of Tinker Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Like her spiritual mentor, she wrote poetry, made naturalistic observations, and recorded her spiritual and philosophical reflections in a journal. In 1974, she came out with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book that went on to earn her the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. She was only 29 at the time.

Since that dramatic debut, she’s become one of America’s most celebrated writers, the author of more than a dozen books, including the 1987 memoir An American Childhood, and The Writing Life, a 1989 book described as “A kind of spiritual Strunk & White.”

In a 1982 review of her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Edward Abbey a fellow environmentalist, said she had a “distinctive passion and intensity, a sort of intellectual radiance that reminds me of both Thoreau and Emily Dickinson.” And in 2007, The New York Times placed her novel The Maytrees on its list of the Top Ten Books of the Year.

Who was this woman?

04/19/2026

This Week's Puzzler

On April 24, 1942, this woman died at age 67 in her home in Toronto, Ontario. Found dead in her bedroom, the official death certificate identified the cause of death as coronary thrombosis, but almost immediately there was widespread speculation that she may have ended her own life through a drug overdose. For decades, she’d been the primary caretaker of her mentally ill husband, and a note found on her bedside table contained these words:

“I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best.”

This week’s Mystery Woman published twenty novels and more than a thousand short stories, poems, and essays. She was best known, though, for creating one of literary history’s endearing fictional characters: Anne Shirley. I’m guessing that you’re not familiar with the name.

However, had I described Anne Shirley as the protagonist of Anne of Green Gables, you might have nodded your head in full recognition. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Anne became so popular that many people thought of her as a real person. Mark Twain described her as “the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice” from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865).

First introduced in the 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, Anne was an 11-year-old orphan girl from Nova Scotia who was mistakenly sent by an adoption agency to two aging siblings—Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert—who lived on a farm in Prince Edward Island. The Cuthberts had requested a boy, because they dearly needed someone to help them work the farm.

Matthew and Marilla’s initial impulse was to send Anne back, but the young girl quickly won both of their hearts, and ultimately the hearts of the rest of the residents of the small coastal village. The tale immediately captured the imagination of readers worldwide and the novel went on to become a literary classic. The novel sold more than 50 million copies, has been translated into dozens of languages, and was far more popular than any of the ten sequels that followed.

Who was this woman?

04/12/2026

This Week's Puzzler (a hard one)

On April 17, 1996, this man died at age 90 at his home in Funem, Denmark. At his death, he was regarded as one of history’s most famous Danes, just behind Hans Christian Anderson and Niels Bohr—and right up there with Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Søren Kierkegaard, and Victor Borge.

Born in Copenhagen in 1905 to a mother who was an opthalmologist and a father who was an engineer, he was raised in what he described as “an intellectual-cultural milieu.” An extremely bright student, he studied physics and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, and then specialized in physics at the Technical Institute of Denmark. One of his country's most influential scientists and inventors, he was also an important contributor to what became known around the world as Danish Design.

An artist as much as a scientist, he is now best remembered for his “Grooks” (in Danish “Gruks”), aphoristic poems that expressed fundamental truths about the human condition in a light-hearted or humorous way.

Who was this man?

03/22/2026

This Week's Puzzler

On March 26, 1911, this legendary American playwright was born in Columbus, Mississippi. His early years were filled with personal struggle, and several decades later, many elements of his dysfunctional childhood would find their way into his plays.

His father was a traveling shoe salesman with a bad-temper, an intimidating manner, and a serious drinking problem. By all accounts, his mother felt trapped in an unhappy marriage. And while she was deeply involved with her three children, she was so emotionally unpredictable—volatile one day, depressed the next—that her children were never sure what life would be like on any given day. Early on, the children often lived with their maternal grandparents, who provided a stable environment that stood in marked contrast to the turbulence at home.

At age twelve, he moved with his family to St. Louis, where his life became even more complicated. As a result of his father’s drinking and anger issues, the family was forced to move from apartment to apartment. In high school, he was the object of incessant teasing and bullying for his deep Southern accent and soft-spoken, slightly effeminate manner (years later, he would come out as a gay man). Like so many tormented adolescents throughout history, he found solace in writing and, by age sixteen, was thrilled when one of his essays appeared in H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set magazine.

From his high school graduation in 1929 until 1944, this week’s Mystery Man attended a number of colleges and worked at a variety of menial jobs as he struggled to make it as a writer. He produced poetry, essays, short stories, and plays, but without much success. In 1944, at age thirty-three, his fortunes changed dramatically when his play The Glass Menagerie opened to rave reviews in Chicago. A year later, the play moved to Broadway, where it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and brought him both fame and fortune.

In 1947, a brand-new play—about the aging Southern belle Blanche DuBois, her younger sister Stella, and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski—achieved even greater success, winning a Pulitzer Prize and becoming one of the most highly regarded plays of the twentieth century.

Who was this man? What was the name of the play?

Address

1416 S Broadway
Denver, CO
80210

Opening Hours

Monday 10:30am - 5:30pm
Tuesday 10:30am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 10:30am - 5:30pm
Thursday 10:30am - 5:30pm
Friday 11am - 5:30pm
Saturday 10:30am - 5:30pm
Sunday 11am - 5pm

Telephone

+13037777653

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Printed Page Bookshop posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Printed Page Bookshop:

Shortcuts

Share

Category