Where to buy used books in Denver

Updated 9/2/2026

South Broadway is the book street, and it runs a lot further than the city does. Printed Page Bookshop at 1416 and Fahrenheit's Books at 1415 face each other across the asphalt in Antique Row; Broadway Book Mall holds the corner at Cedar, eleven blocks north; carry on south past the city line and Englewood adds two more within a couple of blocks of each other. Capitol Hill supplies the counterweight — Capitol Hill Books opposite the gold dome of the State Capitol, Kilgore Books two blocks south on East 13th beside Wax Trax Records — and the rest of this page spills out of the city altogether. Five of the seventeen stops below sit in Englewood, Lakewood, Golden or Arvada, four separate municipalities, and each one says which in its opening line.

Plan the selling side before you plan the driving, because not one counter in this metro pays cash. Capitol Hill Books states it outright: credit on the books alone, appointment required, a two-carton ceiling per visit, and the balance dies after twelve months. Lingering Tales swaps popular fiction the same way whenever its four-day week is open, Kilgore handles buying, selling and trading on all seven, and West Side Books — which used to buy — told readers on its own FAQ page that it is out of the market for the foreseeable future because the smaller storefront has nowhere to put the stock. What Denver does have instead is volume at the bottom of the market: a warehouse retail corner where nothing is over $5, a fairground sale west of town measured in tens of thousands of items, and a Friends bookshop back inside the Central Library.

Three changes since 2024 have made most older Denver roundups unreliable. Tattered Cover was sold to Barnes & Noble in June 2024 and Denverite left it off its April 2026 list of metro favorites on those grounds; Mutiny gave up its Denver corner and reopened down in Englewood, where a new owner took the original building in May 2026; and Petals & Pages closed in March 2026. The fourth is fresher and hurts more: The Book Rack in University Hills, a paperback trader since 1977 and the cheapest bulk bundles in the city, told Denverite on August 21, 2026 that it shuts permanently on September 13 after 49 years.

Spot map

The best spots

Used bookstores

Capitol Hill Books

300 E Colfax Ave, Denver, CO 80203

Directly across Colfax from the State Capitol, and one of the eleven Front Range shops 5280 picked out on April 22, 2026, partly for the searchable catalog on its website and partly for having survived a truck driving through the front wall in 2021. Denverite's roundup the same week credits owner Holly Brooks with holding the place open through the pandemic and then through the bus-rapid-transit works tearing up the street outside; its dedicated Location page posts ten to six Monday through Saturday with a five o'clock Sunday close, while a pandemic-era notice left up on the homepage claims six every day of the week. The trade desk is the reason a reseller comes, and the fine print is unforgiving: no cash under any circumstance, store credit only, by appointment between 11am and 4:30pm, two boxes per slot, credit good for one year. The published reject list rules out textbooks, ex-library copies, abridged editions, computer manuals, hardcover thrillers and anything highlighted or cracked, and if you authorize it, whatever they pass on goes to ARC Thrift and local reading programs instead of back into your car.

Hours : Mon–Sat 10am–6pm, Sun 10am–5pmWebsite
Used bookstores

Printed Page Bookshop

1416 S Broadway, Denver, CO 80210

A blue-and-white Victorian house on Antique Row run as a co-op of booksellers rather than by one owner, and the shop 5280 sent aspiring collectors to on April 22, 2026. Owners John Frantzen, Dan Danbom and Chris Harned all went through the Colorado Antiquarian Book School, Danbom belongs to the ABAA and the ILAB, and the store is a member of the Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Booksellers Association, which is a long way of saying the first-edition pricing here is not guesswork. It buys collections as well as selling them, and its free College of Biblio Knowledge sessions teach exactly the skills a buy counter tests: identifying a first printing, judging a binding, budgeting a run. The schedule it publishes still carries an as-of-May-2021 stamp, so read it as the standing week rather than a fresh posting.

Hours : Mon–Sat 10:30am–5:30pm, Sun noon–5pmWebsite
Used bookstores

Dream Books Co.

4455 Grape St, Denver, CO 80216

A grading-and-resale warehouse off Grape Street in the industrial northeast, with a retail corner it simply calls the bookstore: a weekly-rotating pick of more than 5,000 titles, every one of them priced under $5, per its own store page in 2026. Doors open at 8am and shut at 4pm every day, which makes this the one Denver room you can work before the rest of the city has unlocked. The Friends Foundation behind the Denver Public Library names Dream Books as one of the outlets it consigns weeded library stock to, so ex-library copies land here in quantity — cheap, plentiful, and carrying every stamp and pocket a marketplace grader will hold against you.

Hours : Daily 8am–4pmWebsite
Friends of the Library bookshop

Red Chair Bookshop

Denver Central Library, 10 W 14th Ave Pkwy, Denver, CO 80204

The Denver Public Library Friends Foundation reopened its permanent secondhand shop on the Broadway side of the Central Library's first floor once the renovation finished, and in 2026 it trades daily from 11am to 5pm on donated and weeded stock at bargain prices. The Friends put the yearly take from Red Chair above $200,000, spread across this counter, an Amazon storefront and pop-up sales, with all of it returning to the library. When a bigger sale comes round the shop shuts and the inventory crosses Schlessman Hall into the far larger Park View room: the next runs November 13 to 15, 2026, Friday 10am to 4:30pm, Saturday 11am to 4:30pm and Sunday 11am to 3pm with a $15 bag sale to close it. The organizers ask in writing that you bring your own tote, and the shop itself stays dark all three days.

Hours : Daily 11am–5pmWebsite
Friends of the Library sale

Whale of a Used Book Sale

Jefferson County Fairgrounds, 15200 W 6th Ave, Golden, CO 80401

Held at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds in Golden, west of the city and a long way outside Denver proper, and crowned the metro's best used book sale in the 2026 edition of Westword's Best of Denver. The Jefferson County Library Foundation ran one edition from May 28 to 31, 2026 and lists the next for October 22 to 25, 2026, each promising over 90,000 gently used books, records, collectibles, CDs, DVDs and puzzles across the exhibit hall floor. Admission is $5 per adult per day, free for anyone under 18 and for SNAP recipients, and the Thursday evening that opened the spring edition was a Friends-only preview with no charge at the door. This is the one entry on this page where a barcode scanner and a wheeled crate genuinely pay for themselves.

Hours : October 22–25, 2026Website
Used bookstores

Black & Read

6655 Wadsworth Blvd, Arvada, CO 80003

Up in Arvada, a separate city northwest of downtown, in a former dollar store on Wadsworth that took the 2026 Westword award for best store for used vinyl, books and gaming stuff. Half the floor goes to books, board and role-playing games, DVDs and toys, and the operator's own wording is the useful bit: thousands of half-price-or-lower used books plus a competitively priced rare section. Denverite counted more than 16,000 square feet in April 2026 and mentioned a smaller second store in Wheat Ridge — that one being the discount annex at 4355 Wadsworth, open Saturdays from ten to six, where books start at 25 cents and the owners ask you to call ahead.

Hours : Mon–Sat 10am–7pm, Sun 11am–7pmWebsite

All spots by type

Used bookstores

Used bookstores

Fahrenheit's Books

1415 S Broadway, Denver, CO 80210

Straight across Broadway from the Printed Page, in the same Antique Row block, and the store Denverite singled out on April 22, 2026 for science fiction, critical theory and vintage paperbacks, with sixties and seventies rock playing over the shelves. Stock overflows into stacks on the floor between the cases, which is precisely the kind of unsorted mass a scanner earns its keep on. One warning about timing: Tuesday is closed outright, and the shop's own website and its Instagram bio disagree over whether the other six days finish at 5pm or 6pm, so aim for early afternoon rather than the tail end.

Used bookstores

Broadway Book Mall

316 S Broadway, Denver, CO 80209

A multi-dealer room on the corner of Broadway and Cedar where every bookseller keeps and prices their own stock — science fiction and fantasy under one name, classics under another, Colorado and Western history, mountaineering, sheet music, mystery — which is why the pricing swings hard from case to case. Denverite praised the layout and the prices in April 2026. Watch the street number: its Facebook page and the directories all read 316 S Broadway, while the shop's own website, whose footer stamps a last edit of May 4, 2021, prints an older 200 S Broadway line above the Cedar corner it names in the very same paragraph. Go by the corner rather than the digits.

Used bookstores

Kilgore Books & Comics

624 E 13th Ave, Denver, CO 80203

A tight Capitol Hill room on East 13th, wedged against Wax Trax Records, carrying a constantly turned-over pick of literary fiction, philosophy, science fiction, graphic novels, zines and small-press oddities; Westword's Best of Denver 2026 counted it among the anchors of that block. The policy is four words on its own Instagram bio — buy, sell and trade — and the schedule posted by the affiliated publishing arm reads eleven to six, seven days, with an explicit instruction to phone first. Erato, interviewing owner John Kuebler, put the shop at 800 square feet between two halves of the same record store, which should tell you how the shelving is stacked and how slowly the browse goes.

Used bookstores

The Hermitage Bookshop

290 Fillmore St, Denver, CO 80206

On Fillmore Street in Cherry Creek North, calling itself the oldest independent bookstore in the city and dealing in high-quality used, rare, collectible and antiquarian material across fiction and non-fiction alike. Denverite warned on April 22, 2026 that stock here runs from a few dollars to a few thousand, which is the honest range: a mushroom handbook, a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth and Walter Isaacson's Kissinger all sat in the same new-arrivals feed in 2026. Browsing is organized into unusually narrow categories — America at War, Art of the Book, Esoterica, Our Blue Planet — so ask at the desk instead of walking the room if you came hunting one subject.

Hours : Mon–Fri 10am–5:30pm, Sat 10am–5pm; closed SunWebsite
Used bookstores

West Side Books & Curios

3434 W 32nd Ave, Suite A, Denver, CO 80211

In the Highlands at 32nd and Lowell, trading on the same block since September 1997 and now run by Matt, the former manager, after founder Lois retired; the store has pulled back into the front half of its building, the room that used to hold new titles. Read its FAQ page before you load a car, because the line that matters to anyone selling is blunt: it will not be buying used books for the foreseeable future, the smaller space having nowhere to put them, and it redirects donors to little free libraries or to the public library. Denverite, in April 2026, described what is left as a small and eclectic used and rare selection around a mostly new floor, and noted that Colorado author Kali Fajardo-Anstine once worked here. The compensation is the week: half past nine in the morning until seven at night, all seven days.

Hours : Daily 9:30am–7pmWebsite
Used bookstores

Park Hill Community Bookstore

4620 E 23rd Ave, Denver, CO 80207

Incorporated in 1971 as the Park Hill Cooperative Bookstore, still entirely volunteer-staffed, and listed among Denverite's favorite metro shops on April 22, 2026: donated used books sold cheaply out of an East 23rd Avenue storefront, with the surplus going back into neighborhood schools and libraries. Its 990-EZ for the year ending December 2025, filed on January 20, 2026, records $50,645 of net inventory sales against $45,479 of total expenses and a board drawing no compensation at all, which is the clearest look you will get at what a store of this size actually turns. It is a 501(c)(4), so gifts are not tax-deductible, but a card itself is simple—$20 individual, $25 family or $40 sustaining a year, each carrying a 15% storewide discount plus trade credits, all spelled out on the site's Memberships page.

Hours : Mon–Fri 10am–6pm, Sat 9am–5pm, Sun 11am–3pmWebsite
Used bookstores

Lingering Tales

910 Santa Fe Dr, Unit 101, Denver, CO 80204

A mother-and-daughter shop in studio 101 of the 910 Arts building on Santa Fe Drive, stocking used copies of the books people are actually queueing for — the fantasy off TikTok, the romance with a hold list — rather than a general antiquarian spread. 5280 named it one of the eleven best indie bookstores on the Front Range on April 22, 2026, and its Instagram put the news up that week beside a photo of Dorothy, the shop dog. It rehomes in-demand paperbacks for store credit any hour the door is open, which is not many: Thursday and Friday afternoons, first Fridays running late, and full mornings on Saturday and Sunday. Denver Water started replacing the main along Santa Fe in the week of August 10, 2026 and the shop posted that it is trading through the closures, so follow the detour signs rather than the map.

Hours : Thu–Fri 2pm–5pm (first Fri to 9pm), Sat–Sun 10am–4pmWebsite
Used bookstores

Mile High Comics Jason Street Mega Store

4600 Jason St, Denver, CO 80211

A Sunnyside warehouse that Denverite, in its April 22, 2026 roundup, called one of the world's largest temples to the comic-book art form: new and used comics, graphic novels and toys under one roof, resident cats included, run by Chuck Rozanski. Graphic novels and trade collections are what put it on a book-sourcing route rather than a comics one, since those carry ISBNs and price like books rather than like back issues. The company website has gone untended for years — its own copyright line stops at 2012 — so call 303-477-0042 before you build a morning around it.

Used bookstores

Colorado's Used Bookstore

3461 S Broadway, Englewood, CO 80113

Out in Englewood, a separate municipality at the far southern end of the Broadway run, this has sold general used stock since 1987 across more than thirty alphabetized categories. Its own site advertised a walk-in sale closing on September 30, 2025 — 25% off business, 35% off education, buy-two-get-one on self-help, plus permanent buy-one-get-one carts and a bagged ten-for-$20 deal — which tells you roughly where the pricing floor sits. Phone before you drive, because the schedule is the one thing the shop cannot agree with itself about: the homepage prints a flat noon-to-7pm week while the footer of the same site carves out a 2pm Tuesday opening, and closed on Sunday is the only point both versions share.

Used bookstores

Mutiny Comics & Coffee

3483 S Broadway, Englewood, CO 80113

Also in Englewood, a couple of doors along South Broadway and likewise outside Denver's city limits, this is the shop that gave up its old Denver corner in 2024 and rebuilt itself as a coffee bar, record store, comic counter and used-book room in one. Its own listing describes a large selection of gently used books alongside new and back-issue comics, graphic novels and vinyl, and Denverite in April 2026 put it at the center of what has made this stretch of Englewood worth the drive. The hours are the argument for going: 9am to 9pm Sunday through Thursday, an hour longer on Friday, and 8am to 10pm on Saturday, which nothing else on this page approaches.

Hours : Sun–Thu 9am–9pm, Fri 9am–10pm, Sat 8am–10pmWebsite

Library book sales

Friends of the Library bookshop

Whale's Tale Books & Gifts

Colorado Mills, 14500 W Colfax Ave Unit 527, Lakewood, CO 80401

Out in Lakewood, inside Colorado Mills mall in Neighborhood 5 beside Dick's Sporting Goods, this is the year-round storefront of the Friends of Jefferson County Public Library, and the 2026 Best of Denver awards from Westword pointed readers to it for secondhand stock between the foundation's two fairground weekends. Gently used, ex-library and new books share the floor with vinyl, CDs, DVDs, puzzles, games and gift lines, all at discount prices, and the takings fund library programs across the county. Scan the ex-library shelves carefully: they price lower than anything else in the room and they carry the stamps, pockets and spine labels that most marketplace condition grades refuse to forgive.

Hours : Sun–Fri noon–6pm, Sat 11am–6pmWebsite

Scan before you buy

At every one of these spots, snap the shelf with BiblioScan: the AI identifies each book and shows its real resale price. Walk out with profitable books, not random boxes.

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Local sourcing tips

  • Credit on the shelves is the only currency any Denver counter deals in, so weigh the drive before you fill a trunk. Capitol Hill Books runs the strictest desk and the most rewarding one: its appointment window opens at eleven and shuts at half past four, two cartons come in per slot, and whatever you earn evaporates a year later. It turns down school texts, library discards, condensed volumes, computing manuals, thriller hardbacks and anything carrying a pen mark, and signing the donation waiver sends the refusals on to ARC Thrift and literacy programs rather than back into your passenger seat. Lingering Tales, over on Santa Fe Drive, is looser about what it takes but trades only four days a week; Kilgore does the same swap on all seven. West Side Books would once have been the fourth name here and has left the market entirely.
  • Three dates carry the back half of 2026 and only one of them falls inside the city. Golden takes the first: the Jeffco library foundation occupies the fairgrounds from October 22 to 25 with upwards of 90,000 items, charging adults $5 a day and waving under-18s and SNAP holders straight through. Denver takes the second, when the Red Chair stock crosses Schlessman Hall for three days beginning November 13, the little shop goes dark for the duration, and the Sunday afternoon closes on a flat-price bag. The third is regional rather than local: the Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Booksellers Association held its 42nd Book and Paper Fair on August 14 and 15, 2026 at the Ranch Events Complex in Loveland, an hour north of the city, on a $7 ticket good for both days — that is where the manuscripts, maps and ephemera are, and it is worth the drive once a year rather than on a whim.
  • The geography splits cleanly in two, and the halves want different transport. Everything on South Broadway lines up: Printed Page at 1416 and Fahrenheit's at 1415 stare at each other across the street, Broadway Book Mall holds Cedar eleven blocks north, and past the city line Englewood stacks Colorado's Used Bookstore and Mutiny within a couple of doors. Add Capitol Hill Books and Kilgore, a short walk apart at the top of the hill, plus the Red Chair shop inside the Central Library, and you have a day on foot and light rail. The western half — Lakewood, Golden, Arvada, Wheat Ridge — is a car day, and for the fairgrounds sale specifically, do not turn up without trunk space.
  • Four names in older Denver guides will cost you an afternoon. The paperback trader that has held University Hills since 1977, and priced the cheapest genre bundles in town at $7 for two to five titles, gave Denverite its closing date in an interview published on August 21, 2026: September 13, ending a forty-nine-year run. Petals & Pages shut in March 2026. Tattered Cover has belonged to Barnes & Noble since June 2024 and Denverite struck it off its April 2026 favorites for that reason alone; it trades in new stock, whatever the history on the sign. And the South Broadway corner Mutiny used to hold changed hands in May 2026; the shop itself had decamped to Englewood two years before that.
  • Two Denver operations move books without really selling them, which matters if you are clearing stock rather than sourcing it. BookGive, in a converted gas station at 4890 Lowell Boulevard, hands books to anyone who walks in free of charge and had given away 500,000 since 2019 by the time Westword called it the best free bookstore in its Best of Denver 2026; it takes donations and supplies schools and nonprofits across the metro. The 50/50 Bookstore on Grape Street, a few doors from Dream Books, runs on pay-what-you-can and routes half its takings to a different community partner each month. If you want the western suburbs covered as well, The Book Stop at 10840 W 44th Avenue in Wheat Ridge has been a general used shop since 1987 and lists Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm, on its own site — but nothing published since 2024 corroborates it, so treat that schedule as unconfirmed.

Frequently asked questions

Where can I find cheap used books in Denver?

The floor is well under a dollar and two operators set it. Dream Books prices every title in its retail corner below $5 and turns more than 5,000 of them over weekly; the discount annex Black & Read keeps at 4355 Wadsworth in Wheat Ridge starts books at 25 cents and opens on Saturdays only. After that come the sales — the Jefferson County fairgrounds event in Golden on October 22 to 25, 2026, and the Red Chair three-day sale at Central Library on November 13 to 15, which finishes on the Sunday with a bag priced flat at $15. For steady low pricing without waiting for a date, Colorado's Used Bookstore in Englewood runs two-for-one carts and ten paperbacks in a bag for $20, and Park Hill Community Bookstore has sold donated stock cheaply from the same East 23rd Avenue storefront since 1971.

Where do I sell used books in Denver?

Nowhere in this metro will hand you cash, and that single fact should reshape the trip. At Capitol Hill Books you book a slot, carry in no more than two cartons, and walk out with a credit line rather than money, and the refusal list is long enough that a mixed box normally comes back half full. Lingering Tales will swap popular fiction on the same terms, Kilgore trades all week, and West Side Books quit buying outright when it pulled into the smaller front half of its building, a change Denverite described as recent in April 2026. Sort the box at home rather than at a desk: shoot one picture of a loaded shelf, have BiblioScan pull the spines apart, and each one comes back tagged with what it resells for today. That is what tells you which two or three deserve your own listing and which forty are never going to be more than a credit slip. For real money you are looking at marketplaces and buyback services, not at a Denver desk.

When is the big library book sale in Denver?

Two answers, and the larger one is not in Denver at all. The Jefferson County Library Foundation fills the fairgrounds in Golden with over 90,000 books, records, CDs, DVDs and puzzles, held the spring round across four days at the end of May 2026 and has the fall round set down for October 22 through 25, 2026, at $5 per adult per day with under-18s and SNAP recipients admitted free. Inside the city, the library's own Friends Foundation empties the Red Chair Bookshop into the Park View room at Central Library from November 13 to 15, 2026, opening at 10am on the Friday, an hour later on the Saturday, and running from 11am to 3pm on the Sunday with everything a bag will hold going for $15. Shoppers are asked to bring that bag themselves. The permanent shop is closed for all three of those days, so do not plan on doing both in one visit.

Which day is best for book hunting in Denver?

Saturday takes it, and not narrowly. It is the only day Black & Read unlocks its quarter-book annex in Wheat Ridge, the one day Whale's Tale opens at 11am instead of noon, and the day Park Hill unlocks at 9am, an hour ahead of the rest of its week. Dream Books opens at 8am seven days, so a Saturday that starts there and works south down Broadway will get you through six or seven rooms before the light goes. Avoid Tuesday: Fahrenheit's is shut outright, and Colorado's Used Bookstore may not raise the shutters until 2pm depending on which page of its own site you believe.

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