Des Moines has gained bookstores over the past five years and almost none of them sell secondhand. What the metro actually offers a buyer comes down to three things: one genuine used room tucked inside a record shop in the Roosevelt district, the only Half Price Books in Iowa, and a network of library sale shelves that never really close. Half the dozen stops listed below fall outside the Des Moines line altogether — Clive, West Des Moines, Ankeny, Urbandale and Johnston each run a city government of their own — and no entry below hides which suburb it belongs to. Assume a car for all of it; no two entries here are within a walk of one another.
The date that matters is not a storefront at all. For six decades this city hosted the Planned Parenthood Book Sale, which stopped in 2023 once the warehouse was gone; the volunteers reformed as Iowa's Biggest Book Sale, then brought it back in November 2025 as the YWRC Book Sale, and the autumn 2026 edition takes over the 4-H Exhibits Building on the Iowa State Fairgrounds from October 15 to 19. Nothing else in the state approaches it for sheer tonnage. Plan a trip around those five days and read the rest of this page as what you do the other fifty-one weeks.
Older lists will hand you addresses that only stock new titles. Beaverdale Books on Beaver Avenue, Storyhouse Bookpub in the East Village, Nos Books and Shelf Love DSM near Drake, and Wandering Raccoon out in Grimes all appeared in the Des Moines Public Library's own vendor list for the Grown-Up Book Fair it held on June 6, 2026, and not one of them flags a used or pre-loved shelf anywhere on its own site. Two names from that same list do — The Little Book and Reading in Public — and those two are the ones carried below. One further trap: Classic Book Services on East Army Post Road repairs and rebinds books, and sells none.
Used bookstoresThe Insomniac Bookshop
4211 Chamberlain Ave, Des Moines, IA 50312
Tom Wenck sold online and at pop-ups for more than five years before taking a permanent room inside Rogue Planet Music in the Roosevelt Shopping Center, a launch The Des Moines Register dated to March 21, 2026. The record shop's own vendor page describes the stock as vintage books across poetry, mystery, classics, fiction, LGBTQ+, black and brown lit and local interest, running from the collectible down to the merely odd. He buys as well, on taste rather than a formula: a notice the shop posted on August 31, 2026 asked for counterculture, black studies, women's studies, erotica, sci-fi, art, philosophy, social movements, new age and occult titles, paperback or hardcover, arranged by message or text. That same feed repeated the trading window through August 2026, and MapQuest carries it identically.
Hours : Tue–Sat 11am–6pm; closed Sun–MonWebsite Used bookstoresReading in Public Bookstore + Cafe
315 5th St Ste 100, West Des Moines, IA 50265
Over in West Des Moines, on Fifth Street in Historic Valley Junction, a bookstore and cafe running a written Used Book Program instead of a shelf of leftovers. The published terms: like-new copies only, titles from roughly the past five years or older ones that still move, settled in store credit, with rare and antiquarian material refused along with textbooks, atlases, travel guides and reference works. Assessment happens Monday through Wednesday from 10am to 4pm and Saturday from 9am to noon by appointment, and more than ten books wants a call to 515-864-9089 first. The Des Moines Public Library counted this shop among the fifteen-plus vendors at the Grown-Up Book Fair staged downtown on June 6, 2026.
Hours : Mon–Fri 9am–5pm, Sat 9am–6pm, Sun 10am–4pmWebsite Permanent library sale roomBook Sale Room, Des Moines Central Library
1000 Grand Ave, Des Moines, IA 50309
A standing sale room sits by the Grand Avenue entrance of the copper-paneled Chipperfield building downtown, filled with donated and withdrawn stock and trading whenever the library itself is unlocked. Twice a year the contents spill into the meeting-room wing as the BIG BOOK SALE: the 2026 run covered May 8 through 11 and put books for every age, some audio and video, and oddments down to chairs and coat racks onto the tables. Branch clear-outs work the same way, with Franklin Avenue taking Saturday, August 15, 2026 from 10am to 4:30pm and East Side taking March 16 that year. All of them are filed under a Book Sales program type in the library's own events calendar, and filtering on it is how you catch the next one before it thins out.
Hours : Library hours: Mon–Thu 9am–8pm, Fri 9am–6pm, Sat 10am–5pm, Sun noon–4pmWebsite Charity book saleYWRC Book Sale
4-H Exhibits Building, Iowa State Fairgrounds, 3000 E Grand Ave, Des Moines, IA 50317
The Planned Parenthood Book Sale ran here from 1961 until the autumn of 2023, when a city move to take its warehouse under eminent domain ended it; Iowa Public Radio reported on November 12, 2025 that roughly ten longtime volunteers had incorporated a new nonprofit, Iowa's Biggest Book Sale, and restarted it for the benefit of the Young Women's Resource Center. The autumn 2026 edition runs Thursday, October 15 through Monday, October 19 inside the fairgrounds' 4-H Exhibits Building, which the organizers describe as the sale's longtime home. Scale is the whole argument for coming: the beneficiary advertised 800-plus tables of books, music, art, video games and puzzles for the May 21 to 25, 2026 run, against about 260 tables and 100,000 items at the smaller comeback edition of November 2025. Donations now go into a book drop trailer parked around the clock at 818 5th Avenue, between the events center and the Center Street parking ramp.
Hours : October 15–19, 2026Website Where can I find cheap used books in Des Moines?
A single dollar is where this metro bottoms out, and a suburban library sets that line. Urbandale prices its rolling sale flat at $1 an item with magazines at ten cents, a change it announced on August 17, 2026 when the shelves moved behind the self-checkout. West Des Moines comes next on the permanent shelves in its library atrium, where hardcovers are $2 and everything soft-covered is half a dollar, while the Johnston Lions go lower for one morning a year, filling a supplied sack for $3 at the close of a run that fell on June 11 to 13 in 2026. Among the commercial rooms only Half Price Books in Clive discounts across the board, cutting up to a fifth off store-wide for the Labor Day weekend of 2026, and the fairgrounds sale in October is where cheap and plentiful finally coincide.
Where do I sell used books in Des Moines?
Four counters, and only one of them pays cash without conditions. Half Price Books in Clive quotes on books, music and selected electronics for anyone who walks in on a trading day, which makes it the home for the residue. Reading in Public in Valley Junction pays store credit at set assessment windows and refuses textbooks, atlases and anything rare; Plain Talk wants a web form before you carry a box anywhere; The Insomniac Bookshop takes only what fits a narrow published taste. Do the triage at home first: shoot the whole shelf in a single frame, hand it to BiblioScan, and a current resale figure comes back against every spine on it — enough to separate the small pile you would rather sell yourself from the crate that should cross somebody else's trade counter.
When is the big library book sale in Des Moines?
The Des Moines Public Library runs its BIG BOOK SALE at Central twice a year, and the 2026 edition took May 8 to 11, spreading the permanent Grand Avenue sale room into the meeting-room wing and shelving everything from picture books to discs, plus furniture down to coat racks. Branch sales fill the gaps: Franklin Avenue filled its big meeting room on August 15, 2026, and East Side did the same on March 16 the same year, all posted under the Book Sales program type on dmpl.org. Out in the suburbs the model is different — West Des Moines runs an ongoing sale instead of an annual one, and Urbandale keeps a similar rolling shelf going, and the Ankeny Friends run Novel Findings inside their library every day it opens. The Johnston Lions still do it the old way, with three days in June and a sack sale to finish.
Are there any used book fairs in Des Moines?
One, and it is the reason to plan a trip. Iowa's Biggest Book Sale — the nonprofit that longtime volunteers built after the 2023 shutdown — stages the YWRC Book Sale on the Iowa State Fairgrounds, and the autumn 2026 dates run October 15 to 19 in the same 4-H hall; the organizers advertised better than 800 tables for the May 2026 run there. The Des Moines Public Library adds a smaller one-day version, the Grown-Up Book Fair, which put fifteen-plus local shops and makers inside the Central Library building on June 6, 2026. Beyond those, Brass Armadillo on NE 50th Avenue functions as a year-round version of the same idea, booth after booth trading 9am to 9pm daily with print scattered among them.