The Story of The Owl Pen
On a hot afternoon in 1944, a young woman in her mid-twenties was driving the winding country roads of Washington County, New York, where she was visiting from Manhattan, when her car’s radiator began to overheat. She stopped, turned off the engine, reached for the pitcher she kept in the back seat for these occasions, and followed the sound of running water to find a small stream just off the road. After leaning over to brush the swamp grass aside and fill the pitcher, she stood up and saw the dilapidated century-old farmhouse and its accompanying barns and thought, “This is my place.” Within weeks she had purchased the property and begun on what would be her life’s work.
Barbara Probst had stumbled on a dream. And a very specific one at that. But many of us have dreams that are more often never realized. More importantly, what Barbara had was moxie. She decided to uproot her metropolitan life as an editorial assistant for Mademoiselle magazine in New York City and move to the country to renovate a farmhouse built in the mid 1800s and learn to raise chickens and sheep. Trading the cerebral office life of magazine writing for the grueling physical labor of farming, not to mention renovating a long-abandoned old house, this fearless woman taught herself to plane wood, lay brick, sell eggs, and birth lambs, among other things. After the first freezing winters curled up next to the woodburning stove and bundling up to use the outhouse, her new home eventually became modernized with such high luxuries as heat, electricity, and indoor plumbing.
As years passed and the farming life grew more routine for her, Barbara began the second phase of the dream she never knew she had, an endeavor that would require just as much audacity as becoming a chicken farmer on a whim. By 1960, though she had left the magazine business behind, Barbara had never lost her love for reading, writing, and collecting books. Her next bold vision was to be informed by this passion when she opened Owl Pen Books in a small barn formerly used for a hog pen.
A bookstore in a barn on a rural back road, far from any major interstate, would seem like a foolish venture for any sensible person, but as Barbara admitted in the store’s first slogan, she had “more books than sense.” Even so, if you build it they will come, and within ten years, by word of mouth and a little print publicity, Owl Pen Books had become a regionally known destination. Eventually, the books overtook the chickens, and the chicken coop was cleared to become the space that now houses the main bookstore.
Twenty years later, two frequent customers of the Owl Pen, Edie Brown and her husband Hank Howard, a botany professor at Skidmore College, had been trying their hand at book collecting and selling out of their home in nearby Galway and were looking for a barn of their own to serve as a storefront for their business. They had sensed from talking with Barbara that she was ready to sell the now widely treasured Owl Pen and the property she affectionately called Far Away Hill. One day while leaving the store, Hank turned back to Barbara to say, “Whenever you’re ready, let us know.” Eventually she called and said, “Kids, it’s time.” Barbara Probst entrusted the legacy of her life’s work, the dream she never knew she had, to the best possible successors she could have found. For the next forty years, Hank and Edie saw Owl Pen Books through an evolution of the bookselling business in the burgeoning online market and into the digital age, while expanding the inventory and maintaining the charm of the bookstore as a destination for generations of local readers and visitors from all over the northeast and beyond.
In 2020, after Hank’s passing, Edie decided it was time to retire and pass the torch of a now sixty-year-old institution. Sydney Nichols, a graphic designer, and Eric Kufs, a musician and college professor, had never dreamed of running a bookstore, let alone a bookstore in a barn on a dirt road in rural upstate New York. But after stumbling upon a listing for the property in a Facebook post, the couple, who had just lived through a year and a half of a global pandemic, didn’t hesitate to inquire about Owl Pen. As they learned more about the place, their new dream took shape. Upon meeting Edie, seeing the store up close, and sensing the rich history and the magical surroundings of Far Away Hill, Sydney and Eric were sold on uprooting their lives in California to embark on an adventure, a new chapter for them and their four-year-old daughter. They knew, “this is our place.”
Sydney and Eric, along with their daughter Sally Jane, plan to use their creative skills to draw in the next generation of loyal Owl Pen customers while honoring the legacy that Barbara, Edie, and Hank have built. They know the main thing is to ensure the Owl Pen remains a gem that all types of readers can stumble upon, a place where books and dreams are uncovered.