Fine Print Magazine Shop Might Be Dallas' Next Artistic Hub

You can call it a cliche. You can call it an exaggeration. But when you’re talking with Crystal Cobb inside Fine Print, her newly opened magazine shop in Oak Cliff, you get the sense that her entire life has led up to this.

Tucked away on Madison Avenue, just steps away from the Texas Theatre, the all-white interior manages to balance chic and underground in its own way. The shop houses an equal inventory of international rarities for collectors and entry point publications for someone who just stumbled into the shop. For some of the more popular titles, like Japanese menswear magazine Brutus, and the British culture magazine The Face, Cobb stayed up until the early hours of the morning to lobby and secure copies with the international publishers.

Fine Print is not a street-side magazine stand with cheap tabloids and thin local works. If anything, it leans closer to a luxury store. Beautiful posters and prints hang above a collection of glossy magazines that make you feel bougie even looking at them. Everything is in its latest issue, save for a small curated vintage selection in the back. Our first visit yielded two contemporary film magazines, Little White Lies and A Rabbit’s Foot, neither of which are in circulation anywhere in Dallas.
It’s those same things that everyone says as they enter Fine Print: “We’re so happy this is here.” “We never thought Dallas would have a magazine shop.” “We’ve always wanted something like this.”

Cobb is North Texas born and raised, spending her life surrounded by and obsessed with magazines, but without access to many of them beyond the usual options. Now, she is a web designer by day, art and magazine curator by night, and a part-time professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

“This is probably the longest-standing relationship I’ve had,” Cobb says of magazines. “It started as a child because it’s all we had. We didn’t have the internet. If I wanted to get my hair done, you’re gonna point to which one you want in a magazine. It never stopped. When I got into music, when I got into fashion, it was always around.”

She attributes most of her artistic perspective to her relationship with her artist father, Otis.

“That’s how we spent time together,” she says. “Going to galleries, or his other artist friend’s or bookshops and art supply stores. This is like the house I grew up in — it had art all over the walls. If you saw pictures of my bedroom in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was wall-to-wall to ceiling posters. There was no white on the walls. My mom used to get mad [because] it was a fire hazard. Until I'm saying this, I don't think I realized this is literally my childhood. I just recreated it like posters all over the place.” Cobb’s collection of magazines eventually grew to thousands, but her love for the craft came to an abrupt halt in 2012 when her father died. Her life had changed, and she felt the need to dramatically alter her life on top of it, as if to take back control of the steering wheel. In doing so, she threw away a sizable piece of her collection, and nearly stopped pursuing them altogether.

“I got a little angry at life,” she says. “I think my creative world just crashed down on it. I felt like I threw the biggest part of myself away.”

But almost like a story of true love, Cobb’s visits to New York City, where shops like her’s are far less uncommon, re-centered her. She began to work on a business plan for Fine Print, as both a much-needed addition to the Dallas arts scene and as something of a tribute to her life surrounded by art.

“I had a loss of community,” she says. “One of my friends was like, ‘You build a shop just so you can make friends.’ I kind of took that and ran with it. What’s wrong with that? I do want to be around other creatives. And there’s not a magazine place, a creative source or hub where you can get inspiration.”

Currently, Fine Print is only open on weekends from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, and from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday. For the artist, the art lover or just the curious Dallasite wanting to check out something that has long been missing in the city, a stop at Fine Print is surely in order.

“I learned everything through magazines and books,” Cobb says. “Maybe it’s a little vain, but I just felt like we need to come back to what was originally there for us. As a creative, there’s just so much you can find in magazines.”