At the end of April 2026, a man walked into the Bentonville store carrying a signed first edition of "In Cold Blood" he'd held for thirty-four years — pulled at sixteen from a ten-dollar box of books at a Kansas auction, the newspaper clipping from the reading where it was most likely signed still tucked inside the front. By May the store had it on sale for $5,000, and its sales and merchandising manager was telling the story, clipping and all, on KUAF's Ozarks at Large. That one transaction is the whole company in miniature: Once Upon A Time Books buys over its own counter, one owner at a time. The stock rotates in from a Siloam Springs warehouse of more than 300,000 books — closed to regular browsing, opened to the public for Warehouse Sales a few times a year. Each of the three stores is stocked to its own purpose: the 2016 Tontitown original with its general shelves, a 2024 children's and young-adult store in Fayetteville with a dedicated storytime stage, and the Bentonville shop just off the downtown square, given over to collectible volumes, vintage children's titles, and art books, with a Book Vault of first editions and early printings. The manager doing the telling is also the researcher who prices the collectible stock for all three, so the judgment on what a find is worth stays under the same roof that bought it. Bentonville carries no music or film and only a slim run of comics. This is a door for collectors and long browsers, not media hunters.