Bend, Oregon holds most of its secondhand shelving inside a few downtown blocks and scatters the rest across Deschutes County. Dudley's Bookshop Cafe on NW Minnesota Avenue and the Underground Book Gallery, down a stairwell off NW Oregon Avenue, sit about 160 yards apart, with Big Story another half mile northeast on NE Greenwood Avenue. Everything else needs a car: the Humane Society thrift floor sits 2.3 miles south on Highway 97, and the two entries here that are not in Bend at all are 20 miles northwest in Sisters, where a rare-book dealer and a Habitat thrift store stand 150 yards apart. Any listing pitched in Sisters, or anywhere else past the Bend line, admits as much in its first sentence.
Learn how the counters behave before loading anything into a car, since the two shops that make offers expect to be approached in opposite ways. Big Story takes walk-ins carrying up to 20 books or movies every day between 10am and 3pm, decides in about twenty minutes and pays in money or store credit, and only sends you to email when the load is bigger than that. Dudley's reverses it: photographs of the spines go first whatever the size of the pile, a cash offer comes back, and anything declined waits five days for collection. Big Story is also the one publishing a do-not-bring list, and it is long, running from encyclopedias and school textbooks through cookbooks older than three years to magazines, VHS and any creased spine.
Three things date an older Bend list fast. Deschutes Public Library shifted its center of gravity when the 100,000-square-foot Central Library at 61956 SE Santorini Street opened on May 11, 2026 and the Downtown Bend branch went dark for a long-planned remodel the same spring. Dudley's took a second, 900-square-foot room down in the Old Mill in the middle of May 2026, wedged between Will Leather Goods and lululemon. And the Central Oregon names a search returns first all lean new: Roundabout Books in NorthWest Crossing, whose own page has it selling new books for all ages, along with Paulina Springs Books on W Hood Avenue in Sisters, Herringbone Bookstore in downtown Redmond and Sunriver Books in the Village at Sunriver. Not one of those four publishes a used-books page or a buyback page, so keep the six below for sourcing.
Used bookstoresBig Story Bookstore
228 NE Greenwood Ave, Bend, OR 97701
A unit on NE Greenwood Avenue, half a mile northeast of the middle of downtown, carrying more than 25,000 used and new books by its own count, built up since 2017, plus hundreds of records and films. Its condition bar is Like New or Very Good, loosened for classics printed before 1980, and the wanted list is specific enough to plan around: classics, popular modern fiction, mystery and thriller from 2023 onward, science fiction, horror, philosophy, mysticism, Native American studies, trees, birds, rocks and mushrooms, Pacific Northwest material and graphic novels. Rian and Alyssa Heim, who took the shop over in early 2021 from founders Josh and Jenna Spencer of The Last Bookstore, posted on the store Instagram account on June 8, 2025 that they had also taken on the Root Adorned plant shop in NorthWest Crossing. There is no single clock here: the doors open daily at 10am and close at 3pm on the regular grid, 6pm in summer, 6pm over Thanksgiving weekend and 6pm from the second weekend of December through January 1, with no published date for the summer changeover.
Used bookstoresDudley's Bookshop Cafe
135 NW Minnesota Ave, Bend, OR 97703
Two floors and a coffee bar in the middle of downtown, and the store is blunt about where the used half comes from: wherever it can, with customers named as one of the best sources it has. Email pictures of your spines before carrying anything down, it says, and you get a cash offer you can claim whenever you like; arrive unannounced and staff work through the box as time allows, then hold whatever they passed on for five days before it is donated or recycled. Straight donations are welcome too, though the shop wants a call first to check which subjects it is taking. Owner Tom Beans bought the place in 2015 and opened a second address of roughly 900 square feet near the Deschutes River in the Old Mill District on Friday, May 15, 2026, a date carried by the Old Mill District's own announcement and by Central Oregon radio the week it happened.
Hours : Mon 10am–5pm, Tue–Fri 10am–6pm, Sat 10:30am–6pm, Sun 11am–5pmWebsite Used bookstore and art galleryUnderground Book Gallery
206 NW Oregon Ave, lower level, Bend, OR 97703
A staircase below street level near NW Wall Street opens into 600 square feet of low ceiling and roughly 20,000 used books, a two-minute walk from Dudley's, with a thinner run of new titles mixed in among them. Bend Magazine profiled the room on January 31, 2026 and listed the range: beat poets, classics, a wall of mass-market science fiction and antiquarian material, shelved among ink drawings of the Elusive Taloned Penguin that proprietor Justin Schlosberg draws and sells alongside the books. Schlosberg opened here in 2022 after nineteen years running a bookstore in Breckenridge, Colorado, and set the place up with Bernadette Foley, who co-founded it. First Fridays bring out sake and a piano player and the Upstairs Poetry group reads here on other nights, so an evening call is as likely to land you in an event as a quiet browse.
Where can I find cheap used books in Bend?
Start on Highway 97. The shelter's own thrift floor trades 10am to 6pm on all seven days across what its own August 2026 Facebook post calls 17,000 square feet, and its donation rules name only encyclopedias and outdated textbooks when they turn paper away, next to a blanket line on political or offensive items. Twenty miles northwest, the Sisters Habitat for Humanity store on E Cascade Avenue takes books in sound condition and textbooks under five years old, and adds a noon to 4pm Sunday between June 1 and September 30. Free is possible too: Herringbone Bookstore hands out donated stock at Free Book Day in Redmond, set for September 27, 2026 with an 11am start. Downtown, the secondhand paperbacks Bend Magazine describes below NW Oregon Avenue are the alternative if you would rather browse than drive out to a thrift floor.
Where do I sell used books in Bend?
Two shops buy, and both are downtown. Big Story on NE Greenwood Avenue handles up to twenty books or movies as a walk-in between 10am and 3pm any day of the week, settles in roughly twenty minutes and lets you choose money or store credit; go over twenty items and you mail the shop pictures showing the spines, then typically hear back within two business days. Dudley's on NW Minnesota Avenue wants the pictures up front no matter how big the load, pays cash for what it keeps, and gives you five days to reclaim the rest, after which it goes to donation or the recycling bin. Do the triage at home: photograph the shelf once, let BiblioScan work along the spines it can read, and it returns what each title fetches secondhand, so the car that goes downtown carries only the titles a counter will actually take.
Which day is best for book hunting in Bend?
Saturday, and start it early. Dudley's unlocks at 10:30am, the Humane Society store at 10am, the Sisters Habitat shop runs to 5pm, and Big Story's buying window shuts at 3pm whichever day you pick, so a morning start is the difference between selling and only looking. Sunday narrows the field: Dudley's opens at 11am and the Humane Society keeps its ordinary seven-day clock, but the Sisters thrift store only unlocks on a Sunday between June and the end of September and its donation door is closed all day regardless. Midweek is quieter and perfectly good for buying, and a Friday evening is worth saving for the underground room off NW Oregon Avenue, where the month's opening Friday comes with sake and a piano.
When is the Friends of the Library sale in Bend?
The Bend answer is a historical one. Deschutes Public Library's event calendar still carries the Friends of the Bend Libraries winter book sale of Sunday, January 26, 2020, listed from 1pm to 4pm, and Central Oregon Daily reported the following month that the county system was cutting its ties with the Friends groups and passing fundraising to the Deschutes Public Library Foundation. Rebuilding has filled the years since: the new Central Library on SE Santorini Street opened to the public on May 11, 2026, while the downtown branch shut for its remodel that same spring. Until a Bend group posts a fresh date, the giveaway to build a weekend around is Herringbone Bookstore's Free Book Day in Redmond on September 27, 2026, held in the music hall on SW Forest Avenue.