Beverly Bledsoe Breaks Ground With TerraNova

For a woman who owns a New Age bookstore, Beverly Bledsoe hears a remarkable resemblance to an old-style workaholic. Her desk reflects an everything-squared-away mentality. Her clothing is just this side of dress-for-success. She does not ramble on about “sharing” information with you.

And the philosophy of her store, located in an old house at 3005 Fairmount. seems closer to Emersonian self-reliance than anything else. “It’s obvious a lot of things on planet earth aren’t working; AIDS, the Middle East, the contra hearings,” Bledsoe says. “It’s easy to place responsibility and blame on everyone around us, but everything begins and ends in the self.

“You can’t look to the church or the state or a relationship for answers. People seek out gurus and go to workshops and forget the most important thing, themselves. Thai’s why I opened a bookstore. I hope to offer enough material in a wide enough range that anyone seeking information here will find something. I’m not there to tell them what it is. If they don’t find it, they’re not ready.” Bledsoe’s six-month-old bookstore, TerraNova (which means new earth), stocks 5,000 book titles on New Age-related subjects ranging from psychic channeling to quantum physics, as well as an assortment of crystals, cards, videos, and cassettes. The TerraNova clientele is 80 percent female. “Women are the carriers of the New Age,” Bledsoe says. “They’re much more open to their intuitive, perceptive side. I do get some very confused, unhappy people in here. I’m here to help, but I can’t recommend a book or a crystal that will fix what’s wrong, Everyone has to come to the realization that the truth lies within them,”

Bledsoe, thirty-six, is a Kentucky native who got her start in the fashion industry as a rep at Dallas’s Apparel Mart. From there she went to work in New York’s garment district, where she ultimately owned her own company-and bought a co-op on the Upper West Side before it was fashionable. The sale of that co-op is what financed TerraNova. What inspired it was a trip with a friend to a metaphysical bookstore in New York.

As a result, Bledsoe started reading New Age material, and didn’t quit for two years. The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts was the book that shook her up. “This material isn’t for everyone, but it was for me,” she says. “It was a heavy begin-ning, and it changed my life.”

Bledsoe chose Dallas as a location because she knew it from her Apparel Mart days and thought the city needed an establishment like hers more than New York did. “I love Dallas,” she says, “but Dallas has a tendency to sleepwalk, to take ideas and energy from other places and incorporate them without generating its own. Dallas just needs a little pushing.”