Fine Print showcases magazines and posters from across the globe

Colorful magazine covers pop off the stark white walls to the right. A gallery of posters, featuring a variety of art mediums to the left. Long tables take up the middle of the quaint space on Madison Avenue, showcasing a spread of global artists, photographers and writers.

That quaint space is Fine Print, an independent magazine shop and poster gallery that brings the world to our neighborhood. Curated products highlight design, fashion, photography, art, music, film and travel through shiny, sleek pages and installation-sized prints.

The shop is owned by Crystal Cobb, and although she works as a UX product designer and a University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) adjunct professor, she has had a lifelong ambition of opening her own storefront.

“I would say I always wanted to open a shop, probably since I was like … I think the bug hit me when I was like 13, 14 years old. That’s a long time,” she says.

Originally from North Texas, she spent a decade in Houston where she earned her first degree from Texas Southern University (a B.A. in health sciences that she calls her “parents’ degree”). Initially, she had her mind set on opening a sneaker shop, often finding herself as the only girl in her sneaker community.

“So when I was in college, I wanted to open a women’s-only sneaker shop, and my whole existence at that point was to open a store. And at that time, yes, it was a sneaker shop, but I would say it wasn’t happening. It was like I was always so close, and it just wasn’t happening,” Cobb says.

When she returned to the Metroplex, Cobb decided to pursue a degree for herself, earning a bachelor’s in photography and visual communications from UTA in 2015.

“Me and my dad used to just go around Dallas looking for retail spaces together,” Cobb says.  “After he passed, I would say a lot of the creative stuff stopped.” 

At that point, she threw herself into a “corporate mindset,” working and climbing up as far as she could, becoming more “hyper-focused” on digital experience work in the tech industry than her off-the-clock passions.

“I was working at Dell Technologies, and I had been working from home for so long, being remote for so long, and when I was at Dell, it kind of hit me like, ‘What if this is it?’ Like this is the last job, or what if this job lets me go and I didn’t even try?”

After bringing up the hypothetical to her mom on a Friday and a friend on Saturday, Cobb was laid off by that next Monday.

“It happened just that fast,” she says.

Cobb was laid off for close to a year.

“And in that time, I said, ‘I think whatever I feared the most, it’s already gone, so why not try the store?’” she says.

She also transitioned her original sneaker shop dream into something more than “I’m going to be a cool kid with a sneaker shop.”

“Basically, I started to think more so about community,” she says. “The magazine shop, I think, came from me returning to self, like getting back to getting to know myself again.”

The magazine idea came from her youth, growing up with print editions focused on musicians of the time and covering her ’90s teen bedroom with tear-out posters on the ceiling and all the walls.

“So that love probably came from when I was much, much younger, ripping the posters out of magazines and buying magazines just for the posters,” she says.

As Cobb began writing her business plan for the magazine shop, unlike the chasing she felt with trying to create the sneaker shop, she says she could see everything clearly.

“All of a sudden, answers were showing up, and then I went to a magazine conference. There’s a magazine shop in Europe called magCulture. It’s pretty big. It’s been around for a long time, and he was having a conference, and I took my little bit of money, and I said, ‘I’m going to New York, and I’m going to meet them, and I’m going to get my questions answered and figured it out.’ And I did.”

When it came to finding her physical storefront, she was looking for places that had a history and a diverse community.

Originally, Cobb planned to find a space in Deep Ellum. She recalls fond times with her dad, who was a teacher and artist in his pastime, going through the old graffiti tunnel together. She called it the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“I felt like that was the best place (for the shop), but of course, Deep Ellum changed,” she says. “I sat there and watched it, and it was super empty at the time when I was trying to open there.”

She came across the Madison Avenue spot in our neighborhood after a visit to La Reunion with a friend.

“Someone was like, ‘Just drive down the street,’ and then there was a for-lease sign up, and that’s really how it went,” she says. “And then I thought about it because it was already in my business plan, in my pitch deck, certain specific areas. And so when I drove by, I saw it. It just looked right. It just felt right, and it made sense with the Texas Theatre, and then the other theater further down the street, further down Jefferson … I could just see it even growing to something that’s more for creatives than just, ‘OK, we just got some retail shops, here you go. Walk around the shop.’”

Now more than a year into the shop, Fine Print consistently curates core titles, like Japan’s Popeye and glossies or monthlies such as Cosmopolitan, with the overall selection reaching about 200 titles.

Cobb says highlights of the first year have been seeing people come out to the shop, the creation of regulars she knows by name, and what she’s learned, such as scaling her business rather than taking on too much at once. She plans to continue to grow in terms of events and programming as the shop becomes more established.

“I want this to continue, and I want this to last. … I would love for it to be around for a really long time,” Cobb says, “and so I have to love it and care about it enough to say, ‘I’m going to make sure that this lasts a long time for this community.’”