Trade with us!

On Wednesdays and Saturdays from 9-5 we consider books for barter in credit good toward 90% of your used book purchase total; bring cash, card or a check for the remaining 10%. Please don’t bring in books with excessive grime or with traces of mildew or smoke. And, win our gratitude by not bringing in more than a few dozen books at a time. Allow enough wiggle room in your schedule so that you can enjoy browsing our shelves while we scan in your books; we need you to take away any that we can’t accept. 

New book purchases you make when you trade-in used books get a 10% discount.

 

If you’d like us to look at a larger collection of books, please contact us to make an appointment.

 

Cash?

While we don’t offer cash for used books or take in textbooks for resale, the main exception to each of these rules overlap in our textbook buyback program. If you have current editions of higher-ed texts which you’d like to sell, contact us for a quote or to schedule a meeting with one of our buyers.

 

A few reasons we might not accept books

While we seldom have time on busy trade-in days to explain our reasoning on each book we reject for trade, we can provide this list of general factors we consider as we process books brought in for barter:

 

• We already have sufficient stock of the title or within the section

• Damage or defect

• Limited market potential including but not limited to the following:

  
   

  • Serial romances (the skinny, numbered ones)

  • Celebrity biographies

  • General knowledge encyclopedia sets

  • Reference and nonfiction books which are out of date

  • Most hardcover genre fiction more than a year past publication date

  • Most paperback genre fiction more than a decade past publication date

 

 

 

 

What’s the price?

First, look for a City Lights bar code label. If it has one of our labels, that’s our price on the right-hand end of the bar code. If it doesn’t have our label, here’s how pricing works for the remainder of our unlisted used books:

 

• Pocket paperbacks (a.k.a. mass-market PB) sell for half the original cover price, typically $3-$5.

• Hardcovers and the larger, trade paperbacks (a.k.a. quality PB) should have the price penciled on the upper-right corner of the first page.

• With some of our rare and valuable books we’ve used a bookmark to indicate the price so we don’t diminish the collectibility through the use of stickers.

• The little, colored dots on the spines of some of our books are the remnants of a simple stock rotation system which is being phased-out as we now catalog and barcode incoming used books. Ask about additional savings available when purchasing some of our slower-moving books.

• While we try to mark-out or remove all previous sellers’ prices (except for the publisher’s cover price, the removal of which decreases the value for collectors), our prices are as outlined and we are not bound to any prior selling prices which may remain visible. In some instances, collectible books may be priced higher than the publisher’s cover price.