Portland, Maine keeps most of its secondhand trade on a single street. Congress Street runs roughly a mile from the East End down to Longfellow Square, and four of the stops below sit along it: Carlson Turner up by Eastern Cemetery, Yes Books and Strange Maine side by side at Congress Square, and the Green Hand a few blocks west. Dugan Murphy, the walking-tour guide behind Portland by the Foot, revised his survey of the city's bookshops on August 30, 2026 and counted eight bookselling addresses along the Arts District stretch alone, ten minutes of pavement end to end. Only some of those eight deal in used stock, and separating the two is what this page is for.
The rest of the map is volunteer-run and wants a car. Five library and charity operations inside the same radius move donated stock at prices no storefront can match: permanent rooms in South Portland and Cumberland, a five-day sale in Freeport, one Saturday in Westbrook, a summer tent sale in Scarborough. Four of the five sit beyond the Portland city line, so their entries lead with a town name before anything else.
Three counters take books in, and only one of them will hand you money. Longfellow pays store credit at about 30 percent of the price it intends to charge; Nonesuch credits 20 percent of cover price, paperbacks only; Carlson Turner is the one that makes an offer on a whole library, and it asks for photographs of the spines before it asks for your car outside the door. Nothing here resembles a Half Price Books or a 2nd & Charles — the closest thing to a chain is Sherman's in the Old Port, and everything on its shelves is new.
Used bookstoresThe Green Hand Bookshop
661 Congress St, Portland, ME 04101
Owner Michelle Souliere wrote on the shop blog on March 24, 2026 that scaffolding has hidden this shopfront since the summer of 2023, when the City of Portland required it over the Trelawny Building facade, and that the crews now talk about finishing no earlier than the end of October. Look for the sandwich board and the carp windsocks at the small gap in the hoarding instead of a window, or ring 207-253-6808 — the same post says drivers circling Longfellow Square phone in regularly because they cannot spot the door. Inside is a general used stock with a pronounced lean toward science fiction, horror, weird fiction, cryptozoology, the occult and Maine, plus a thin selection of new titles. Souliere is out of the building on Mondays, which is the one day of the week her contact page rules out entirely.
Hours : Sun noon–5pm, Tue–Fri 11am–5pm, Sat 11am–7pmWebsite Used bookstoresYes Books
589 Congress St, Portland, ME 04101
Congress Square, directly across from the Portland Museum of Art, and the hardest room on this list to search in any systematic way. Dugan Murphy, in the August 30, 2026 revision of his Portland bookshop guide, describes opening the door onto stacks of books standing in front of other stacks of books, with a bookseller somewhere behind them offering to help; the stock is secondhand, vintage and antiquarian across every subject, filed by a logic that rewards patience. Nothing you want is visible from where you are standing, so the technique is to shift the merely interesting things aside until the good one appears. No opening grid is published anywhere the shop itself controls, so call 207-775-3233 before you plan an afternoon around it.
Antiquarian & binderyCarlson Turner Books and Bookbindery
241 Congress St, Portland, ME 04101
Up at the East End of Congress Street, opposite Eastern Cemetery, Portland's oldest burying ground, Scott Wilson keeps what his Maine Antiquarian Booksellers Association entry calls 50,000 selected used books, from cheap paperbacks up to fine antiquarian, with maps, prints, antique radios and typewriters wedged between the cases, and does hand bookbinding on the premises. Murphy's guide, in its late-August 2026 pass, flags the short week here, and the shop's own page confirms it: four afternoons, plus appointments for anyone who cannot make them. The published buying policy is the single most useful page on this peninsula for a reseller — telephone before you haul anything over, carry it in yourself if it is under forty or fifty volumes, and for a bigger library email or text photographs of the spines on the shelf rather than shots of individual titles. Formal appraisals for insurance or probate have stopped, though an opinion on a book or two is still given freely.
Hours : Wed–Sat 11am–5pm; also by appointmentWebsite New & used, trade counterLongfellow Books
1 Monument Way, Portland, ME 04101
Monument Square, and the only downtown counter that prints its arithmetic: store credit rather than money, at roughly 30 percent of whatever Longfellow decides to charge, so an $8 shelf price returns $2.40. One bag or box at a time, left during opening hours and worked through usually within a few days by its own account, with the same page warning that intake pauses whenever the back room fills up. Read the refusal list before a single box goes in the trunk — underlining or highlighting, torn or yellowed pages, split spines, missing jackets, textbooks, dated travel guides, discs, magazines, and for the moment most children's books, cookbooks and oversized art books; whatever they turn down is donated unless you collect it inside seven days. The room itself has mixed new and used for decades, and the store was advertising an Elizabeth Poliner and Debra Spark author evening for September 15, 2026 when this page was checked.
Hours : Sun–Sat 10am–6pmWebsite Permanent Friends bookshopThe Friends BookShop, South Portland Public Library
South Portland Public Library, 482 Broadway, South Portland, ME 04106
Also in South Portland, in the basement of the Broadway main library, the Friends run a standing shop rather than a once-a-year event, staffed by volunteers on a four-day schedule they publish themselves and posted repeatedly through 2025 and 2026 on their own feed, most recently on May 31, 2026. Donations come in during those same shop hours only, two boxes to a donor in any one day, and the refusal list is firm: no videos, textbooks, scholarly titles, antique books, encyclopedias or magazines of any kind. What the volunteers say they want most is newer and recently popular material, which happens to be what a reseller wants to find on the shelf. The group credits BookShop takings with paying for roughly sixty library programs a month, so the room turns over faster than its size suggests.
Hours : BookShop hours: Tue–Thu and Sat 10am–3pmWebsite Friends of the Library saleFriends of the Freeport Community Library Book Sale
Freeport Community Library, 10 Library Dr, Freeport, ME 04032
Fifteen miles northeast in Freeport, the outlet town, and the group calls it their largest fundraising event of the year: the Friends put the 2026 edition in the library meeting room from September 24 to 28, opening with a paid preview on Wednesday, September 23 from 3 to 7pm at $20 a head, free to members. The final two days, September 27 and 28 from 10am to 3pm, collapse into buck-a-bag pricing, which is the cheapest hour of the year anywhere inside this radius. Donations were collected across a single fortnight, September 8 to 22, so what reaches the tables is one fresh intake rather than a year of accumulated leftovers. The library trustees carried the same dates on their June 10, 2026 meeting agenda, which is about as firm as a small-town sale gets.
Hours : September 23–28, 2026Website Where can I find cheap used books in Portland?
The library volunteers set the floor, and none of them are in Portland proper. Prince Memorial Library in Cumberland keeps a hallway sale open five days a week at $3 an adult hardcover, $2 a large paperback and $1 a small one, prices reset on May 1, 2026 after more than twenty-five years unchanged. The Friends BookShop under the South Portland library unlocks on four separate days each week and takes in fresh donations daily. Freeport drops to a dollar a bag on September 27 and 28, 2026, the last two days of its five-day sale, and Scarborough charges members a flat dollar a book at its June tent sale. In the city itself the cheapest working shelf is the paperback run at Strange Maine on Congress Street, where a few dollars buys an armload.
Where do I sell used books in Portland?
Carlson Turner on Congress Street is the only counter that will buy a whole library outright, and its own policy page tells you how to open the conversation: call first, and for anything past forty or fifty volumes send photographs of the spines as they sit on the shelf rather than shooting titles one at a time. Longfellow Books on Monument Square pays store credit at about 30 percent of what it plans to charge — an $8 book returns $2.40 — one bag at a time, with a week's wait and a long list of things it will not take. Nonesuch Books in South Portland credits 20 percent of cover price and only on paperbacks, weekdays from 10am to 6pm. Two of those three pay in credit, so sort the haul before it leaves your house: photograph a full shelf, hand the picture to BiblioScan, and it lifts each title off its spine and prices it against the live resale market — which separates the handful you should list yourself from the carton that can go over a counter.
Which day is best for book hunting in Portland?
Saturday takes it by a street. Every storefront on this list is meant to be trading on a Saturday, the Congress Street chain included, and the Green Hand stays open until 7pm — two hours later than the rest of the street. The Friends BookShop in South Portland runs 10am to 3pm on a Saturday, and Prince Memorial in Cumberland is open 9am to 5pm. Sunday is thinner but not empty: the Green Hand, Longfellow and Total Loss all open, while Carlson Turner, the Cumberland hall and the South Portland shop are all shut. Monday is the thin one: Carlson Turner, Total Loss, Prince Memorial and the Green Hand all sit dark, and only Longfellow keeps its usual ten-to-six downtown.
When is the Friends of the Library sale in Portland?
Not inside Portland at all. Every Friends group worth a tank of gas here runs out of a neighboring town, and four of them are worth the trip. Freeport is the big one, September 23 to 28, 2026 in the Freeport Community Library meeting room, with a $20 preview on the Wednesday and buck-a-bag pricing on the final Sunday and Monday. Scarborough holds its annual sale in June under tents beside the library shed, and takes drive-up donations from 9am to noon on August 22, September 19 and October 17, 2026. Two never shut: the Friends BookShop downstairs in South Portland, open 10am to 3pm on four days of the week, and the hallway sale at Prince Memorial Library in Cumberland, which keeps whatever hours the building keeps all year and adds a bigger sale every October. One more sits outside the library world entirely — the Friends of Feral Felines take the Westbrook Community Center for a single Saturday, September 26, 2026, from 9am to 2pm.