Heather Friend and her husband Stephen Friend run the Turn a Page Bookshop with the help of a few fuzzy friends like this giraffe and teddy bear who live amongst the thousands of books.

Turn a Page This Summer

With all the excitement surrounding the opening of Stanley Marketplace in northwest Aurora, the quiet opening of a secondhand bookshop just down the street may have gone unnoticed. Since September 2016, Heather and Stephen Friend have been operating Turn a Page Bookshop just west of the corner of Dallas and Montview. For the Friends, opening the bookshop is a homegrown, family affair, a natural outgrowth of their relationship.

Stephen had worked in receiving at the LoDo Tattered Cover for years and had been moved to the Cherry Creek location in 2005 when back-office operations moved there. Heather worked the floor at the Cherry Creek Tattered Cover seasonally, to supplement her income from teaching. “He started working on the floor while he was there and was pulling books for return, and he was always doing it in my section,” recounted Heather. After he got up the nerve to ask her out, the relationship blossomed, and they were married a few months later, in December 2005.

In 2016, family connections brought them to the modest storefront in Aurora that used to be a warehouse, and immediately they thought of a bookstore. “Stephen wanted to do it,” said Heather. “I wasn’t even going to be a part of it. He wanted to run it. We started setting up, and I helped him with that, and then he told me one day, ‘Clearly, this is your bookstore.’”

She continued, laughing, “Now we have this ongoing, silly little fight that I see this as his bookstore and I’m working to help him with this, and he says, ‘I think of this as your bookstore and I think I’m just helping you out!’”

But since Stephen has a full-time job with DPS managing its science resource center, day-to-day operations fall to Heather, so far the sole employee, who brings her past experience as a teacher into the process. “I get to teach here, too,” says Heather. “I love watching children learning to love to read. It is the best day when a kid comes in here and sees a book on the shelf and is like, ‘Oh my God! I love that book!’”

Turn a Page has a whole section devoted to children’s literature and offers an 11am story time on Saturday mornings. They’ve partnered with Westerly Creek and its summer reading program, “Book It to the Creek,” by donating 10% of related book purchases back to the school.

And their general book offerings are robust, with the cozy space filled floor to ceiling with used books in all categories of fiction and non-fiction. The collection of over 12,000 volumes came largely from estate sales, donations and purchases, and Turn a Page offers customers the option of trading in used books for store credit to continue building its collection.

Turn a Page also welcomes book club meetings at the shop after hours. “I love being able to do that,” says Heather. Book clubs bring in their own food and beverages, and Turn a Page can special order books for them at a 15% new book discount, she added.

Find Turn a Page at 9575 E. Montview Blvd. Tu-Fr 10-6, Sa-Su 12-4. Contact turnapagebookshop@gmail.com for more information.