Trade with us!

On Wednesdays and Saturdays until 5 p.m., 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, no books which are soiled or have traces of mildew or smoke Win our gratitude by not bringing in more than a few dozen titles at a time. Allow enough wiggle room in your schedule so that you can enjoy browsing our shelves while we tally your credit. 

Ask for 10% off a used book purchase when you trade-in used books.

If you’d like us to look at a more extensive 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  • Reference and nonfiction books which are out of date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?

Look for a City Lights barcode label, usually affixed to the back of the book :

 

• 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.

• 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.