We’ve got a family business!

Ashar and cat Mitts helping with family business computer work

Since last week, we’ve done something crazy and cool. We’ve added a new family business to the mix!

We’re now the proud owners of a space at a local antique mall. There, we’ll be taking our formerly digital-only business into the bricks-and-mortar world, selling used books, ephemera, postcards and more under the name of Papergreat.

We’ve had, for several years, an online bookstore through Amazon where we’ve sold used books. And for the past two and a half years, my husband, Chris, has blogged about ephemera and old books at Papergreat. This is our chance to bring those efforts together – and get our feet wet in the realm of local selling, which we’ve only done intermittently until this point.

And it’s our chance to truly have a family business, one that Ashar can be as involved in as the rest of us. Tonight, we started pricing and labeling our books. Ashar’s job was to look up the book in our Amazon listings and tell us what we had it listed for; mine was to label it accordingly in pencil and update it in our inventory spreadsheet; and Chris’s was to carry all the books and be the final price arbiter. We got about 100 of them done as a team! (And, as you can see in the photo with today’s post, even Mitts the Cat helped. Less willingly.)

Tomorrow, we’re hopefully going to start filling our space, and I’ll be able to share photos. We officially open for business on March 1, so we’ll have a busy couple of weeks ahead! Wish us luck…

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10 thoughts on “We’ve got a family business!

    • Hi Eileen! We sell mostly antiquarian books – usually 1970s or older – and mostly nonfiction, but we do sometimes come across those! I could certainly let you know if we happen on any! I was reading a little about your writing program and it sounds cool!

  1. This is so cool! Congratulations! Owning an antiques business has always been something that intrigued me.

    I know you live in PA. Is this anywhere near New Hope?

  2. Sounds like a really neat “hands-on” learning experience for Sarah and the rest of you, I see you are using a pencil to label and price them. I can’t tell you how often I wanted to buy a book at a yard sale or a flea market and they had stick-on price tags. Even though the price tags were removable — they often leave a glue residue or mar the suurface of the cover or endpapers. Having been involved in book and other ephemera sales in flea markets, I noticed that so many people do not have respect for old books and paper documents. People often open the book and press it flat on a table. I have also experienced that some people like to go through books every page at a time with really no attention of buying. I understand that, but unfortunately when many people do it for a period of time – the pages deteriorate. Best wishes on your new adventure — have fun and enjoy

    • Jim, that’s something that is really important to us, too! We really have a great respect for these “old guard” books, as we sometimes call them.

      So far, it’s been a blast!

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