The Story House Bookstore stands at the intersection of legacy and possibility.

Arthur Marx grew up in a family whose name has been woven into Springfield’s history since the 1880s, when Marx Clothing Store first opened near the square. Entrepreneurship, resilience, and community are part of his inheritance. So is something more personal — the artistic legacy of his grandmother, Pinky Marx.

Pinky was a painter, photographer, gardener, traveler, and relentless creative spirit. She captured the Grand Canyon and Yosemite in radiant color, earning admiration for her bold eye and devotion to beauty. Her home held hundreds of pieces of art — her own and others’ — quietly waiting for their next chapter.

That chapter began when Michael Bruner walked through that house and saw not just a collection, but a calling.

Before returning to the Ozarks, Michael spent decades teaching rhetoric, language, and critical thought. But long before lecture halls, in the early 1980s, he spent time in Los Angeles with a poetry collective that emerged from the punk rock scene called The Lost Tribe — a group raw enough and bold enough to even appear on The Gong Show. Art, performance, and language have always been inseparable for him. The classroom was only one stage.

Interior designer and local artist Penny Scroggs saw the house not just as square footage, but as atmosphere — light, texture, gathering spaces that invite people to linger. Her instinct is to make rooms feel lived in and alive, to blend art and environment so seamlessly you don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

And Brian Scroggs — writer, filmmaker, and Creative Director — brings the conviction that stories shouldn’t just sit quietly on shelves. They should be spoken, filmed, staged, debated, and shared. That a bookstore can be a launchpad, not simply a retail space.

When the historic 1897 house on Walnut Street became available, the vision found its frame.

Today, The Story House is an independent bookstore, art space, and growing cultural hub. Pinky’s artwork lives throughout the building — not as nostalgia, but as foundation. Upstairs rooms are being reimagined for workshops, readings, lectures, and reader’s theater, with plans for coffee, community gatherings, and eventually a black box theater in the carriage house out back.

We are building a home for readers, thinkers, creators — and what we affectionately call “humble amateurs” — people who make things not because they are famous, but because they must.

The Story House isn’t just about selling books.

It’s about giving stories — and the people who carry them — a place to belong.