Rapid City keeps most of its secondhand paper inside four downtown blocks and then makes you drive for the rest. Saint Joseph Street carries two of them facing one another across the road, Again Books at number 612 and the St. Joe Antiques Mall at 615, and the Friends' room sits two blocks south inside the public library on Quincy. Beyond that the map spreads out: Everybody's Bookstore stands roughly two miles west on West Main behind a painted wall, the South Dakota Mines campus store is just over a mile east in the Surbeck Center, and the nearest bag sale of any size runs thirteen miles up the interstate in Piedmont, which is Meade County rather than Pennington. Wherever an entry falls outside the municipal boundary, that fact leads its description.
Settle who pays before the trunk gets loaded, since around here most of them will not. Everybody's takes whatever the community carries through the door and hands back store credit instead of money; the owner told Ponder Magazine she had spent something like thirty dollars buying stock in her entire time as proprietor. Again Books is the one storefront that advertises purchasing used copies outright, and the Rocker Shop up on campus quotes an ISBN price through its own buyback tool, warning that anything no Mines instructor has readopted fetches only a wholesale rate. The remainder are nonprofits or dealer floors: the Friends live on donations, the antiques mall settles every transaction through a single owner at a single register, and Piedmont moves what it has gathered by the bag.
Two facts date an older Rapid City list immediately. The first is that South Dakota holds no Half Price Books whatsoever; asked for everything inside 300 miles of downtown, the chain's own locator hands back an empty result, so the outfit that calls itself America's largest family-owned retailer for new and used books has no presence anywhere near the Black Hills. The second is that several names a search puts near the top deal in new copies: Mitzi's Books on Main Street, which the same May 2025 Ponder Magazine feature traces to a 2013 opening by Ray Hillenbrand, and Monarch Books and Boutique at 631 Main, which KOTA covered days after Caitlin and Andrew Nissen opened it on Saturday, May 31, 2025. Van Norman Rare Books, meanwhile, is a listing rather than a shop: the Rapid City Journal wrote in January 2016 that slow trade had pushed Robert and Erin Van Norman to an online-only business after less than two years at 519 Main Street.
Used bookstoresEverybody's Bookstore
3321 W Main St, Rapid City, SD 57702
A mural reading So. Many. Books. wraps the building on West Main Street, a good two miles out from the downtown blocks, and Ponder Magazine set out in May 2025 how the shop came to be Jessie Polenz's: she was working Mondays behind the counter when the owner, Lori Speirs, listed it for sale in 2022, drew no buyer across six to eight months and moved to liquidate. Polenz bought it instead, cut the inventory back, arranged what was left by genre and author, and added a marking system that shows her how many years a copy has stood on the shelf. Almost all of it walks in: she told the magazine she had spent roughly thirty dollars on books since taking over, and that people who bring theirs leave holding store credit rather than cash. Its Facebook page advertises 55,000 used volumes where the Yelp listing says 36,000, so treat either count as approximate and allow yourself a long browse.
Hours : Mon–Sat 10:30am–5:30pm; closed SunWebsite Used bookstoresAgain Books & Bazaar
612 Saint Joseph St, Rapid City, SD 57701
An independent downtown shop whose website leads with thousands of secondhand titles and then t-shirts, gift books, greeting cards, CDs, audiobooks and jewelry, and which states outright that it will look at yours when you are downsizing or making room. A Facebook post dated July 24, 2026 and signed by Jeanne and Julie marked twenty years in business, thanked two decades of staff for keeping the shelves full, and offered 20 percent off the following day to anybody who dropped in to say happy anniversary. That site never publishes a schedule, so the grid attached here follows MapQuest and Loc8NearMe, which match each other; separate storefronts on Amazon, Libro.fm and Bookshop cover anything you would rather have shipped to you.
Hours : Mon–Sat 10am–5pm; closed SunWebsite Friends of the Library bookstoreThe Little Book Shoppe
Rapid City Public Library, 610 Quincy St, Rapid City, SD 57701
The Friends of the Rapid City Library hold a year-round room within the downtown building on Quincy Street, opened in 2015 by their own account and filled entirely from public donation. Everything carries a posted flat price: $2 a hardcover, $1 a large paperback, 50 cents mass market, and a quarter apiece for children's titles, DVDs and books on CD, with rare material marked individually. Both the group and the library publish an identical grid to the minute, 9 to 7 early in the week and 10 to 6 from Friday onward, which makes this the only door listed here that opens on a Sunday. A post on their Facebook page dated June 6, 2026 thanked donors for over twenty boxes of books and puzzles after a donation day and promised a restock, though staff pick titles for the collection first and part of what remains is routed to an online secondhand seller before the shelf ever sees it.
Hours : Mon–Thu 9am–7pm, Fri–Sun 10am–6pmWebsite Where can I find cheap used books in Rapid City?
Start with the nonprofits, because none of the commercial floors here posts a price list. The Little Book Shoppe, run by the Friends inside the public library at 610 Quincy Street, works off a fixed list that runs from $2 down to a quarter depending on format, with anything unusual priced by hand. Thirteen miles northwest in Piedmont, the Friends of that library sell by volume instead, $5 a bag and $1 per disc at the two sales they staged in 2026, one over the last week of January and one across the Fourth of July holiday. On the commercial side, the St. Joe Antiques Mall lists used books among its departments and adds a few discounted new ones, but a dealer booth is where you go for a title you cannot otherwise find rather than for the lowest number on the sticker.
Where do I sell used books in Rapid City?
The honest answer is that the market is narrow. Again Books & Bazaar is the one shop on Saint Joseph Street that says on its own website it wants to see your used copies when you are downsizing, and its July 2026 anniversary note framed the whole twenty years as buying from the community and reselling what it found. Everybody's Bookstore on West Main takes donated books and issues store credit rather than paying out, which its owner explained to Ponder Magazine in May 2025 as the reason she has bought almost nothing herself. If your pile is course material, the South Dakota Mines Rocker Shop in the Surbeck Center runs an ISBN buyback page, though it says the system is for its own students. Do the sorting at your own kitchen table rather than theirs: turn the spines to face you, capture the run in a single photo, and BiblioScan hangs a resale value on each spine it recognizes, so sixty seconds later you have separated the two or three keepers from the carton that goes downtown.
When is the Friends of the Library sale in Rapid City?
There is no dated one, and that is the point. The Rapid City Friends do not run a calendar event; they run a shop, The Little Book Shoppe, immediately inside the library at 610 Quincy Street, open whenever the building is, which means 9 to 7 through the first four days and 10 to 6 for the last three. Stock turns over with donations, and their Facebook page recorded more than twenty boxes arriving after a donation day on June 6, 2026, with restocking to follow. If you want an actual sale with dates on it, the nearest is Piedmont, thirteen miles northwest in Meade County, where that Friends group priced bags at $5 across a January window and again over the Fourth of July week in 2026, both of them advertised through the library itself.
Which day is best for book hunting in Rapid City?
Saturday, and by a distance. All six stops on this page trade that day, but two of them close early: the Rocker Shop only runs 10:30 to 1, and Piedmont Valley Library also stops at 1, so drive those before lunch and leave Saint Joseph Street and West Main for the afternoon. Sunday is the opposite, with Everybody's, Again Books, the antiques floor and the campus shop all dark and the Friends' room the only thing trading, from 10 until 6. Midweek suits a slower pass, since the library building holds on to 7 o'clock through Thursday and Piedmont does the same on a Tuesday, while Monday is the one day the drive north is pointless because that library does not open at all.