Where to buy used books in Buffalo

Updated 9/3/2026

Spot map

The best spots

All spots by type

Local sourcing tips

• Only one stop on this page publishes terms for turning a box of books into money, and it is on Grant Street. Rust Belt states on its site that it buys for cash or store credit on the five days from Tuesday to Saturday, noon until 5pm, prefers photographs by email first, and takes donations from non-smoking households as a separate matter. The room facing it is the mirror image and says so without hedging: Westside Stories does not buy, accepts donations only while the new owners work down inherited stock, and points anything oversized at the AAUW sale or at the nearest library. A genuinely scarce shelf belongs at Old Editions in North Tonawanda instead, on the strength of the ILAB and ABAA memberships it advertises rather than any published buy list. And do not plan around the chain: hpb.com/new-york.html was returning a 404 on September 3, 2026, and the company directory at hpb.com/stores, read the same hour, ran to 116 shops filed under nineteen state headings, not one of which was this state; Ohio and Pennsylvania hold the closest.
• There is a citywide passport, and the 2026 edition had an unusually long tail. Buffalo Independent Bookstores announced through Buffalo Spree that it was joining the thirteenth Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 25, 2026, with stamps collected between April 11 and the 25th to enter the Fast Track draw. New for that year was a Slow & Steady track: collect a stamp at every participating shop between April 11 and September 7, hand the passport in at any of them, and you are entered in a one-winner draw for a $25 gift card to each store — twenty-seven of them by the group's own count. Most of those twenty-seven trade in new books — Actual Books in Kenmore stocks new titles and gifts, Merit Badge Books in Hamburg specializes in new releases, Read It & Eat deals in cookbooks and food writing, Zawadi Books in works by and about people of African descent — so the passport is a map of the scene rather than a sourcing route — but the Spree notice says each participating shop lays on its own events, promotions and giveaways for the day, which makes that last Saturday in April the one date worth walking the whole thing.
• The one pile in this region big enough to fill a car is not in a shop and it is not open. The AAUW Buffalo Branch tells donors on its book sale page that it starts taking books the week of September 20, 2026 at a new collection site, 3774 Harlem Road in Cheektowaga, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 9am to 1pm plus Saturdays from 10am to 1pm, with no pickups — and that the sale itself is set for June 2 to 6, 2027 at a venue it has not yet named. The same notice warns that the sign on the Harlem Road building still says Minuteman Press, which is the sort of detail that saves a wasted trip. Thrift is the weak flank here: Goodwill of Western New York advertises fashion, home décor and DIY supplies on its own shop page across eleven area stores and never names books anywhere on it, so nothing from that side of the market earned a listing above.
• Buffalo carries more bookstores than a city its size has any right to, and the majority are of no earthly use to a reseller. Burning Books on Connecticut Street bills itself as a radical independent shop for activism and politics, Alice, Ever After Books on Parkside Avenue as a curated collection of children's literature, Talking Leaves on Elmwood Avenue simply as an independent and idiosyncratic bookstore, and none of those three descriptions mentions secondhand stock. Black Rock Books on Niagara Street is the one to call before you set out: its own site never once uses the word used, though the first-person copy under its name on Visit Buffalo says it carries new and used books along with paper, pens and puzzles. Dog Ears on Abbott Road in South Buffalo is a bookstore and café attached to a literacy nonprofit, and the copy it publishes runs from new releases to old classics without ever saying used. Two names that survive in older roundups are dead ends: the Second Reader Bookshop shut its Hertel Avenue room after eighteen years when the pandemic hit, WKBW and the Buffalo News both covering it at the time, and Gutter Pop Comics trades at 1421 Hertel now; while Old Editions left the downtown address at 74 East Huron Street that half the internet still lists, and WNY Papers already had it on Oliver Street when it wrote the shop up on August 14, 2020.
• Read every grid before you build a day out of this map, because the traps are all scheduling. Nothing on Grant Street opens on a Monday, Westside Stories stays shut until Thursday, and the Porter Avenue library room is dark on Fridays as well as Sundays, so a Monday run through the West Side gets you a coffee and nothing else. Fitz is the exception that opens seven days, from noon, and stretches to 9pm on Wednesdays alone. Turn the Page in Hamburg publishes no grid of its own and the Book Corner posts two schedules that contradict each other, which makes both of them phone calls rather than gambles. Geographically the sensible split is a northern loop — Grant Street, then Hertel Avenue, then a stop each in Kenmore and Tonawanda proper, then Oliver Street up in North Tonawanda and on to Niagara Falls — against a southern one that pairs Orchard Park with Hamburg, a shade over five miles apart as the crow flies, and an eastern detour to the two Amherst branches when a clearance week is actually running.

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