A Used-Book Treasure Hunt Worth Taking Slowly

Ceiling-high shelves set the tone before the browsing has properly begun. This is a used bookstore built for wandering: books fill shelves and stacks, continue into a small nook, run along a corridor, and open into a series of smaller rooms beyond.

A quick stop can turn into a long afternoon without much effort. The aisles are dense, the inventory runs across genres and decades, and every turn seems to offer another shelf that deserves a closer look.

The pleasure here is not limited to locating one item on a list. A familiar paperback may be sitting beside an out-of-print curiosity, an old series book, or a subject you had not thought about since school. Bring a title in mind if you like, but leave room for the detours.

The layout has the appealingly old-school quality of a place that has kept growing around its books. Corridors, nooks, tightly packed aisles and smaller rooms give the shop a maze-like rhythm; one section leads to another instead of resolving into a single broad sales floor.

There are steps leading to the nook, and one of the back rooms is reached by stairs. Two other smaller rooms are on the ground floor. Books also appear along some floor areas, so the browsing calls for a little attention to where you are stepping.

A store map may help orient a first visit, particularly when you are after a particular subject. Still, getting a bit turned around is hardly a wasted outcome in a store arranged for discovery.

The shelves range well beyond the usual used-bookstandards of mysteries, literature and art. Browse long enough and the subjects can shift to mountaineering, wars, wedding planning, Biblical studies, language books, or Japanese home design.

That breadth makes the shop useful for a specific project as well as a Saturday browse. A reader researching a wedding or hunting ideas for a home library may find a volume with exactly the right odd little angle, while somebody else is simply pleased to come away with a forgotten novel.

Older books give the place much of its character. The book-filled air and the visual clutter of worn spines, aging jackets and tightly grouped titles suit the search for material that has been off the ordinary retail path for years.

Readers with childhood favorites in mind have reason to slow down. The collection includes substantial runs of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, the sort of series shelves that can make an adult reader start checking titles against a long-ago memory.

Vintage pre-teen classics add another layer of nostalgia, while vintage Christian classics and Biblical studies books offer a different kind of older publishing history. These are not the same browsing mission, and that is part of the store's appeal: it makes room for both.

Science-fiction and fantasy readers get a particularly specific landmark in the form of a dedicated Babylon 5 shelf. It is a small detail, but it says a good deal about the depth of a shop willing to give shelf space to a devoted corner of a fandom.

The store does not require you to solve its whole geography alone. Staff members are friendly and knowledgeable, able to point shoppers toward requested authors and books, and ready with recommendations when a search needs a nudge.

That sort of memory is especially welcome in a shop with so many possible directions to take. Ask about an author, a genre or an obscure subject, then return to browsing with a better idea of which corridor to follow.

It also makes the store workable for mixed book-loving groups. One person can hunt mysteries, another can head for vintage series titles, and a third can ask after history or design without turning the visit into a coordinated expedition.

Not every find needs to be a major purchase. Carts or an outdoor rack of books priced at 25 cents offer a low-stakes way to sample the store's abundance: an unfamiliar paperback, a battered classic, a volume bought mainly because the cover was too good to leave behind.

The wider used-book selection is known for reasonable prices, which keeps the hunt pleasantly open-ended. You can browse for a serious addition to a collection without feeling that every book picked up has to justify itself.

A small stack of inexpensive surprises is a perfectly respectable result here. So is finding one elusive title after an hour of searching.

This is a destination for unhurried browsing rather than a quick in-and-out errand. Hours can disappear among the back rooms and packed shelves, especially if you enjoy pulling out a book simply because its spine looks promising.

Repeat visits have their advantages. With used inventory, another trip can bring another set of discoveries, and a section that seemed thoroughly searched last time may offer a fresh surprise later.

The shop is open on Sundays, which suits a slower browse. It has a small parking lot behind the building and sits on a corner; it is also described as easy to reach from the freeway.

The tightly arranged interior is central to the store's charm, but it is not a wide-open browsing environment. Stairs, steps and occasional floor stacks are part of the route through the collection.

There is no public restroom, so the bookstore works best as a focused stop or as one piece of a longer outing. Then again, with rooms still unexplored and shelves still waiting, “focused” may be harder to manage than it sounds.