My 1960s job at a Barber’s Book Store in Fort Worth was bibliophile heaven

Those who have lived in Fort Worth long enough remember the early days of Barber’s Book Store as a downtown institution – a treasure house of volumes that put all the department store book sections to shame. Long before there was Border’s or B. Dalton’s or Barnes & Noble, there was Barber’s Book Store.

I started working at Barber’s in the summer of 1967 before my senior year at Paschal High School. It was an independent bookstore, which was rare even then, offering a little bit of everything but specializing in used and rare books.

After a perfunctory interview by owner Brian Perkins, I was hired to be the “night man” on Fridays. It was the ideal job for a 17-year-old bibliophile who had tried and failed on the Dr. Pepper loading docks. I came in after school – between 4 and 4:30 p.m.

My job was to stock the new paperbacks that came in every week, make deliveries to downtown offices, and take the mail across the street to the little post office inside the Federal Building. That took up the first hour or so, before the regular staff went home about 5:30 p.m. Mr. Perkins sometimes stayed later working in his office.

Once everyone went home, the whole place was mine! I turned off Mr. Perkins’ opera music and turned on my little portable radio to listen to rock stations KXOL or KFJZ, propped up my feet behind the cash register, and read whatever book(s) in the store struck my fancy. At 8 p.m. I closed up, cleaned out the coffee pot, and turned out the lights, locking the door with the key Mr. Perkins had entrusted me with.

The store’s location on the corner of Eighth and Throckmorton was historic. It was one of the oldest buildings in Fort Worth. The bookstore began in 1925 on the opposite side of Eighth Street in a three-story Mutual Savings and Loan building constructed in 1908 and tucked between Ellison’s Furniture store and the W.T. Waggoner building. The distinctive structure, with its two floors of tall, arched windows, came down in the 1950s, replaced by a new Mutual Savings and Loan building.

About 1935, Barber’s moved across Eighth Street, taking over the first floor of a modest two-story building with an art deco facade of black vitrolite tile. It had show windows facing both Eighth and Throckmorton, the cheapest kind of advertising in an era when downtown traffic still moved on the sidewalks. The most interesting thing about the space was that it had 20-foot ceilings, which allowed an early owner to build a mezzanine in the rear area of the first floor. As the home of a bookstore, it held more book shelves and a staff break room.

Discovering a second-floor neighbor: the Adams Hotel

The store had an upstairs neighbor on the second floor: the Adams Hotel, which had a single door entrance on Throckmorton leading up a staircase to the registration desk. The Adams was what might be called a “flophouse.” The 17 rooms were arranged around a large central air shaft with just a couple of bathrooms down the hall for everybody. Over the years, the hotel went through several names — from the Kingsley to the Amon — before becoming the Adams Hotel in the 1950s.

In 1960, Brian Perkins bought the store and the deserted Adams Hotel. Apart from lugging books up and down the stairs, I used to take high school buddies up there after closing time and give them the grand tour of the dark, dusty rooms. Contrary to some legends about the building, we never encountered a single ghost.

Barber’s was an old-fashioned operation. We rang up sales on an antique cash register, that kept a running tape of sales but did not indicate how much change the customer had coming. Sales were written up on little receipt pads, making a carbon copy. Prices were added in your head, and the tax calculated from a laminated card on the register.

Besides bending the rules by my choice of music, I did something else my senior year that I can confess to now. Senior activities were going on, and business was always slow on our end of town on Friday nights. Without telling the boss, I closed the story early on a couple of nights so I could pick up my girlfriend, and we could go out. Fortunately, Mr. Perkins never caught me.

I went off to college in the fall of 1968 but continued to work at Barber’s during Christmas holidays and summers. Eventually, I figured out I was losing money working at the store. I kept finding books I wanted to purchase, putting them behind the counter until payday when I settled up with Mr. Perkins. Half the time I wound up just signing my paycheck over to him. He even gave me an employee discount, which just encouraged me to buy more books.

Mr. Perkins finally closed the larger store in 1997, conceding the field to age and the chain bookstores. The back of the building went to his son Wesley, and the bookstore operates there today with an entrance on Throckmorton. Mr. Perkins also disposed of some 70,000 used books he had collected over the years. I think that hurt him more than selling the store. But he found an eager buyer for his vast collection in best-selling author Larry McMurtry, who loaded them up by the carload and took them to his own bookstore in Archer City.

Brian Perkins eventually passed on to the Big Bookstore in the Sky — where every book is a rare, signed collectible. As for me, I can’t pass by that corner today without feeling nostalgic.

Debunking legends of the Barber’s Book Store building

I can swear to the truthfulness of my own memories, but a lot of bogus legends have grown up around the building, most of them connected to Hell’s Half-acre and/or ghosts. Mr. Perkins himself once told a reporter he had heard mysterious footsteps and “thumping” noises while working late at night. Whatever mysteries the building holds, that corner was never part of Hell’s Half-acre. Fort Worth’s red-light district did not extend west of Main Street or north of Ninth Street.

Attempts by modern writers to cast the Adams Hotel as a bordello are fanciful. No business-minded madam would have set up shop there, and its construction in the 1920s places it well after the era of “the Acre.”

Nor does the historical record show any murders or suicides occurring at that location — just a few mischievous high school kids sneaking up to the second floor, and a teenage bookstore employee playing his radio too loud and sometimes leaving early.

If any ghosts haunt that building, it’s the ghost of Brian Perkins mourning the passing of old-fashioned bookstores, where a cornucopia of used and new books mingled, and the unhurried browser might find a rare volume tucked away on a back shelf.

Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.

This story was originally published June 14, 2025 at 5:00 AM.