Half Price Books, the flagship

This is the original one, and the biggest. Half Price Books started in Dallas in 1972 when Ken Gjemre and Pat Anderson opened a used bookstore in a converted laundromat with two thousand books off their own shelves. It is still run by the family and Anderson’s daughter is the chief executive now. The Northwest Highway store is the company’s headquarters and the largest Half Price Books in the country — about 54,000 square feet of selling floor, holding something over half a million books, records and games.

The number matters less than what it does to the room. The store is big enough that children move through it at speed and nobody looks up. You see kids running in there most visits. In a bookstore that would normally be a problem, and here it simply is not.

The children’s section has a small wooden playhouse with seats built into it, and a tree. On a weekend the playhouse is usually taken, but the store has sitting areas scattered through it, so being second in line for the playhouse costs you nothing.

How we actually use it

Run first, read second. We let them move until the running is out of them, then we sit down and read a few books together. Doing it in that order is the whole trick — asking a three-year-old to settle before he has spent anything never works, and here there is room to spend it.

It is rarely the reason we drove down. We go when we are already out — a museum, or a run to the Costco Business Center — and this is the stop in the middle that resets everybody. That is a real category of place and there are not many good ones in it.

There is a cafe in the store now, La Casita Coffee, which took over the old Black Forest Cafe space in 2024 and has its own door to the street. Being able to sit down with a drink in the middle of all this is genuinely useful. The drinks and the food are not good. Both of those things are true and the first one is why we still use it.

The educator card, if you homeschool

Half Price Books issues an Educator’s Discount Card that is worth knowing about: 10% off in-store purchases, all year, on top of the usual pricing. Homeschooling parents qualify. You apply in person with documentation from a state or local homeschooling organization, it renews every year, and it does not work online.