Where to buy used books in New Orleans

Updated 9/30/2026

Five secondhand shops sit inside a ten-minute walk of Jackson Square, which is more than most American downtowns manage in a whole metro. Crescent City Books holds the corner of Chartres and Bienville; Beckham's is three blocks downriver on Decatur; Faulkner House hides in Pirate's Alley behind the Cabildo; Arcadian is around the back of the cathedral on Orleans Avenue; and Dauphine Street Books, despite everything the name promises, is at Chartres and Madison. Past that cluster the trail leaves Orleans Parish entirely. Metairie and Kenner are Jefferson Parish, Arabi is St. Bernard, and four addresses on this page fall outside Orleans Parish altogether — each of those names its own parish in the opening line.

One counter in this metro publishes what it pays, and it is not in the French Quarter. Blue Cypress Books on Oak Street states the split in figures on its own sell page: an offer based on each title's resale value, then 50% of that in shop credit or 25% in cash, with buying hours posted and Saturday deliberately left out. Everywhere else is a phone call. Faulkner House asks you to call the shop for anything rare, signed or out of print; the Latter carriage house and the Jefferson Friends store run on donations and hand back no money whatsoever; and Beckham's and Dauphine Street Books now share one owner, so one conversation covers two storefronts.

Three things in older New Orleans round-ups will waste your afternoon. Kitchen Witch, for two decades the cookbook shop everyone recommended, says on its own homepage that it was a brick-and-mortar book shop and now sells house-blended spices only. A Gallery for Fine Photography, whose interior walls opened to reveal thousands of photobooks, left 241 Chartres in the summer of 2025 and reopened at 7457 St. Charles Ave, where the books are no longer part of what it advertises. And beckhamsbookshop.com has been out of the shop's hands for years — the Internet Archive already caught it returning a 404 in January 2024, and by April 2026 the address was serving an online-casino affiliate page. The bookstore is fine. The domain is not.

Spot map

The best spots

Used bookstores

Crescent City Books

240 Chartres St, New Orleans, LA 70130

The corner of Chartres and Bienville has carried this shop since 1992, and it belongs to a dwindling set of ABAA and ILAB member shops you can still walk into off the street. Field notes filed on May 1, 2025 by the bookseller behind the Downtown Brown newsletter describe a single bright room: a wall of collectible first editions, a working run of used titles, new books of local interest, and bins of vintage maps and prints. The shop's own page claims good books and prints from the last 500 years and keeps the door unlocked all seven days, while its searchable catalog sits on Biblio — worth a look first if you are crossing town for one specific title.

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Used bookstores

Beckham's Bookshop

228 Decatur St, New Orleans, LA 70130

The oldest bookstore in the Quarter opened in 1967 and has been at 228 Decatur, opposite the House of Blues, since 1979. A dealer's walkthrough of the neighborhood published in May 2025 broke the succession: founders Carey Beckham and Alton Cook retired and sold both the business and the building to Steve Lacy, who already owned Dauphine Street Books, and the same account warned that the shelves had thinned while one owner learned to supply two rooms. Its Facebook page, still being updated in August 2026, gives 10am to 7pm seven days a week, 364 days a year, with Mardi Gras the single exception. New Orleans' official visitor site puts the holding at fifty to sixty thousand secondhand books across a wide range of subjects.

Hours: Daily 10am–7pm

Used bookstores

Blue Cypress Books

8123 Oak St, New Orleans, LA 70118

Woman-owned, on Oak Street in the Riverbend since 2008, shelving new and secondhand side by side — and the only desk in this metro that prints its numbers. Its trading terms, published and live on the shop site in September 2026, run like this: staff make an offer against each title's resale value, you pick 50% of it in shop credit or 25% in cash, and buying runs Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm and Sunday 11am to 3pm, never on a Saturday, with a pause between Thanksgiving and New Year's. The exclusions are just as explicit — no textbooks, no ex-library copies, nothing that came out of a Little Free Library, no highlighting, no missing dust jackets, and no cash option on children's books. It prices its own secondhand stock at under half original retail on average, pushes rare and interesting finds through an eBay storefront, and treats anything past 500 volumes as an estate to be discussed separately.

Hours: Mon–Fri 10am–6pm, Sat 10am–5pm, Sun 11am–4pmWebsite

Library Foundation bookshop

Carriage House Books

5120 St Charles Ave, New Orleans, LA 70115

The old carriage house behind the Milton H. Latter Memorial Library, on the St. Charles streetcar line, holds the permanent secondhand shop whose takings go back into the New Orleans Public Library. The Library Foundation of New Orleans, which runs it, posts Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday from 10am to 2pm for both buying and dropping off, and its intake rules turn away encyclopedias, textbooks, law books, computer manuals, magazines and anything touched by smoke or water. In late August 2026 the Foundation was pointing shoppers at three channels at once — this shop, its roving sales and an eBay storefront — which tells you the volunteers already lift the obvious money before the shelves see it. Priced to clear rather than to market, so it repays a full-shelf sweep far more than a title-by-title hunt.

Hours: Wed, Thu, Sat 10am–2pmWebsite

Annual charity book fair

Symphony Book Fair

UNO Lakefront Arena, 6801 Franklin Ave, New Orleans, LA 70122

The LPO Volunteers ran the 73rd edition on May 30 and 31, 2026 at the UNO Lakefront Arena, an event the orchestra's own page traces back to 1957. Organizers price most paperbacks at $1 and most hardbacks at $3, sort fiction and nonfiction into 50 categories, and add sheet music, LPs, CDs, DVDs, audiobooks and framed artwork; a nola.com report filed from the warehouse on May 19, 2026 put the count at 40,000 books and found a three-volume 1773 set of Captain Cook's voyages priced at $300 on the rare table. Saturday costs $20 for first pick until noon per the volunteers' page — the LPO's own event page says 1pm — and entry is free after that, through 6pm, Sunday is free from 9am to 4pm, and the 11am-to-2pm children's session on the Sunday sells a decorated bag of kids' titles for $5. Cards work with a $1 surcharge, parking off Franklin Avenue is free, and the rare shelf is the one to walk first — it is priced by a volunteer specialist, not by a machine.

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All spots by type

Used bookstores

Dauphine Street Books

818 Chartres St, New Orleans, LA 70116

Whatever the sign says, do not go to Dauphine Street. Steve Lacy named the shop after its first address, kept the name when rising rents and thinning foot traffic in the upper Quarter pushed him out, and now spends part of every day explaining that the door is at Chartres and Madison; he told a visiting dealer in spring 2025 that the new room, with windows on two sides, pulls far more trade than the old windowless one where browsers used to get handed a flashlight when the wiring failed. Lacy has close to forty years in the secondhand trade behind him, going back to Logos Books in Santa Cruz. The store's Facebook page, active through August 2026, dates the business to 1994 and leans literature, art, local history, collectibles and signed copies.

Used bookstores

Arcadian Books & Prints

714 Orleans Ave, New Orleans, LA 70116

Around the back of St. Louis Cathedral, across from the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, sits the shop everybody warns you about: stacks to the ceiling and aisles that a dealer writing in May 2025 likened, only half in jest, to coal mining. Where Y'at's city bookstore guide credits the owner with knowing where each title sits and being able to discuss it in more than one language, and flags a large bilingual French section behind the piles. There is no website, no online catalog and no directory hours you should trust, so treat this as somewhere you pass twice on foot rather than somewhere you schedule.

Used bookstores

Faulkner House Books

624 Pirate's Alley, New Orleans, LA 70116

Two rooms in the townhouse where William Faulkner rented a second-floor apartment in 1925 and finished Soldiers' Pay, opened as a bookshop in 1988 and bought in October 2019 by Garner Robinson and Devereaux Bell. The secondhand side is real but narrow: the shop asks on its own contact line that you call before buying or selling anything rare, signed or out of print, and its business listing repeats that beside fiction, poetry and local interest. A Louisiana bookshop round-up dated July 16, 2026 calls the space small, polished and quiet, with first editions and Southern classics shelved like a private study rather than a shopfloor. This is where you take one signed Southern first edition, not where you fill a tote.

Hours: Daily 10am–5pmWebsite

Used bookstores

Two Foxes' Books

6233 S Claiborne Ave, New Orleans, LA 70125

The newest room on this page: an online seller that took a storefront on South Claiborne near Calhoun, facing the Tulane and Loyola side of the avenue, and announced it on Craigslist in the last week of September 2026. The pricing is the simplest in town — every book on the shop floor is $5, or two for $8 and three for $10 — across roughly 4,000 titles by the owners' own count, plus a rotating crate of records, CDs and DVDs. Anything collectible skips those shelves and goes straight to the TwoFoxesBooks eBay store, so the flat-price shelves hold what the owners chose not to list one by one, and your margin is whatever they underrated. It buys, sells and trades every day it is open, and its site invites you to send a few photos before hauling boxes over; no payout rate is published, so ask before you unload. Look for lace curtains and a small tree in the window.

Hours: Mon–Sat 11am–6pm, Sun 12pm–5pmWebsite

Used bookstores

Parlour Books

3218 Dauphine St, New Orleans, LA 70117

Up a narrow staircase in the Bywater, a one-room secondhand shop that the American Booksellers Association's member listing describes as an intentionally curated selection with a little something for everyone. The stock is literary and idiosyncratic rather than broad, and the proprietor works the floor alone, which is why the hours are short and worth confirming before a trip across town. Directories are split between 3218 and 3229 Dauphine; the shop's own Instagram bio gives 3218, and that is the number to walk to. Yelp last refreshed the page in August 2026 with the business still open.

Used bookstores

Two Fish Books

7265 St Claude Ave, Arabi, LA 70032

Out in Arabi, over the line in St. Bernard Parish, this one shares a room with the Arabi Coffeehouse and is run by two retired teachers, Ann Costanza and Gail Calato. Their own site, carrying a 2025 copyright, records the move here from Cafe Aquarius, and their Bookshop.org profile describes a general store selling both new and used titles — note that the Chalmette address on Paris Road still circulating in trade directories is the old one. It is a short run down St. Claude from the Bywater, so it pairs with Parlour rather than justifying its own trip, and the shop was still posting author events in August 2026.

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Library book sales

Friends of the Library sale

Algiers Regional Library Book Sale

Algiers Regional Library, 3014 Holiday Dr, New Orleans, LA 70131

The Friends of the New Orleans Public Library run a Saturday sale at this West Bank regional branch, 10am to 2pm, and it is still within city limits despite the river crossing. Their Facebook page was running it live on Saturday, December 6, 2025, holding the doors open until 3pm that day, so the posted window is a floor rather than a promise. Used books, music and movies at sale prices, laid out by volunteers instead of a buyer, which is exactly where mispricing lives. It is a small room next to the Latter shop — make it the second stop on a West Bank morning, not the reason for one.

Hours: Sat 10am–2pmWebsite

Permanent Friends store

Friends of the Jefferson Public Library Store

East Bank Regional Library, 4747 W Napoleon Ave, Metairie, LA 70001

Out in Metairie, in Jefferson Parish rather than the city, the parish Friends group keeps a year-round store on the ground floor of the East Bank Regional Library, one block west of Clearview Parkway. Its purchase page, updated on March 18, 2026, lists previously owned books beside records, postcards, stationery and small gifts at bargain prices, and gives a long midweek shift with shorter afternoons the rest of the week. The same volunteers stock a $1 paperback cart in every branch across the parish all year, which turns one Metairie errand into four or five extra bins on the way home.

Hours: Tue–Thu 10am–6pm, Fri–Mon 1pm–5pmWebsite

Semiannual parish book sale

Big Book Sale

Pontchartrain Center, 4545 Williams Blvd, Kenner, LA 70065

Out in Kenner, well upriver of the Quarter and two parishes from Bywater, the Jefferson Friends take over the Pontchartrain Convention & Civic Center twice a year. WGNO counted 65,000 books on the floor when the spring edition ran April 17 to 19, 2026, and nola.com had covered the previous one over October 24 to 26, 2025, so the pattern is one spring and one fall weekend rather than a fixed date you can diary a year ahead. Books share the hall with puzzles, DVDs, CDs and vinyl LPs, and the organizers call this their major fundraiser, with roughly 100,000 volumes moving through in a year. Doors opened at 10am on the Friday in 2026, and Friday is the session to make if you are working volume.

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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.

Try BiblioScan for free

Local sourcing tips

Only one desk in this city will tell you its numbers before you drive over. Blue Cypress makes an offer against resale value and lets you take 50% in credit or 25% in cash, on weekdays from 10am to 5pm and Sunday from 11am to 3pm, with Saturday off the table and a shutdown between Thanksgiving and New Year's. The French Quarter works by phone instead: Faulkner House asks for a call on anything rare, signed or out of print, and since Steve Lacy now owns both Beckham's and Dauphine Street Books, one conversation reaches two storefronts. The library operations — the Latter carriage house, the Algiers branch sale, the Jefferson store — take donations and pay nobody, so they are buying ground only.
The calendar has two dates that matter and the rest is weekly rhythm. Both big rooms had already run when this page was checked: the 73rd Symphony fair took the UNO arena on May 30 and 31, 2026, and the Kenner sale took April 17 to 19, 2026 after an October 24 to 26, 2025 edition, which is the spring-and-fall cadence to plan around. Week to week, the carriage house behind Latter opens Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday from 10am to 2pm, Algiers runs Saturday mornings, and the Metairie store opens every day with a long Tuesday-to-Thursday shift. Sunday is the thin day — the Quarter shops carry it, Two Foxes on South Claiborne opens from noon to 5pm, and almost nothing else does.
The Quarter is the only part of this trip you do on foot. Crescent City, Beckham's, Faulkner House, Arcadian and Dauphine Street Books sit inside a few blocks of each other, which makes a morning; after that you need the streetcar or a car. The St. Charles line drops you at Latter for the carriage house, Oak Street in the Riverbend takes Blue Cypress, South Claiborne at Calhoun takes Two Foxes, and St. Claude Avenue strings Parlour in the Bywater to Arabi. Metairie, Kenner and the lakefront arena are all car trips, and the West Bank branch means the bridge or the ferry.
Four entries in older guides will cost you an hour each. Kitchen Witch is not a bookshop any more — its own site states, in the past tense, that it ran a brick-and-mortar culinary book shop for twenty years and now sells house-crafted seasonings. A Gallery for Fine Photography left 241 Chartres in mid-2025 and now sits at 7457 St. Charles Ave, where its photobook cabinets are no longer part of what it lists. Beckham's is open, but beckhamsbookshop.com is not its site: the Internet Archive shows the domain already dead in January 2024 and serving casino promotions by April 2026, so use the Facebook page. And Dauphine Street Books is on Chartres, which the owner will confirm before you finish the sentence.
Think about where the pricing labor actually happens. The Quarter shops sell to visitors at retail and their owners know exactly what a signed first edition is worth, so margin there comes from knowing something specific — Louisiana history, French-language stock at Arcadian, a Southern author nobody has looked up. Volume margin sits with the library operations, where volunteers price by format rather than by title. The catch is that the Library Foundation and the Jefferson Friends already run their own online storefronts, one on eBay and the other on eBay and Amazon, so the easy money has been skimmed once before you get there. Scan wide and fast on those tables rather than hunting deep, and expect the miss rate to be in your favor on anything outside the categories they have learned.

Frequently asked questions

Where can I find cheap used books in New Orleans?

The bottom of this market is a dollar, and library volunteers set it rather than the stores. The Symphony fair tags most paperbacks at $1 and most hardbacks at $3, and sold a decorated bag of children's books for $5 in its Sunday session on May 31, 2026. The Jefferson Friends keep a $1 paperback cart in every branch of the parish system all year and put 65,000 books on the Pontchartrain Center floor in April 2026. Between events, the carriage house behind Latter Library and the Saturday table at Algiers Regional both price to clear rather than to market. Among the year-round stores, Blue Cypress is the honest baseline, since its own sell page admits the secondhand shelves average under half of original retail.

Where do I sell used books in New Orleans?

Two counters publish their terms, and just one prints an actual rate. Blue Cypress on Oak Street values each title on resale and pays 50% in shop credit or 25% in cash, weekdays 10am to 5pm and Sunday 11am to 3pm, never Saturday, and it will not touch textbooks, ex-library copies or anything highlighted. Two Foxes' Books on South Claiborne buys and trades on every opening day and will quote from photos sent ahead, but posts no rate, so settle the split before the boxes leave your car. For rare, signed or out-of-print material the call goes to Faulkner House, and one call now covers both Beckham's and Dauphine Street Books since they came under Steve Lacy's ownership. Neither the Latter carriage house nor the Metairie store buys anything — they take donations only. Triage before you drive anywhere: point a camera at the whole shelf, let BiblioScan work down the spines, and every one of them returns with a current resale number attached — enough to separate the two or three you ought to list yourself from the boxful that simply belongs at Oak Street.

Which day is best for book hunting in New Orleans?

Saturday, and the reason is geography rather than hours. It is the one day the carriage house behind Latter Library and the Algiers branch sale both run, from 10am to 2pm, which lets you take the St. Charles line and the West Bank in a single morning while the Quarter shops stay open around them. Wednesday and Thursday are the quieter alternative for the same two library rooms minus the crowd, and they are also when the Metairie store keeps its longest shift. What Saturday costs you is the Blue Cypress buy desk, which is closed for trading that day — so sell on a weekday and hunt on the weekend. Sunday leaves you the French Quarter, the Two Foxes afternoon on South Claiborne, and little else.

When is the big library book sale in New Orleans?

Two of them, in two different parishes, and they alternate through the year. The Jefferson Friends hold their sale at the Pontchartrain Center in Kenner twice annually — April 17 to 19, 2026 for the spring edition, October 24 to 26, 2025 for the one before it — with roughly 100,000 volumes passing through across a year and 65,000 counted on the floor in April 2026. The LPO Volunteers run the Symphony Book Fair at the UNO Lakefront Arena at the end of May; the 73rd edition took May 30 and 31, 2026, and $20 buys you the first three hours on the Saturday before admission goes free at noon. Neither publishes its next dates far ahead, so check the organizers in February and in September. Between those weekends, the carriage house behind Latter Library sells every Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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