Rochester, New York keeps most of its secondhand books on one road. Monroe Avenue picks up Before Your Quiet Eyes at number 439, Rick's Recycled Books at 737 and McFall's at 1122, then carries on past Twelve Corners into Brighton, where Bruno's Books & Beans at 1752 and Distant Lands at 1780 stand eighty yards apart. That is five storefronts on a single street, and close to two miles from the first to the last.
Downtown supplies the two extremes. Greenwood Books on East Avenue has sold old and rare stock since 1998 from a picked, quiet room, and seven hundred yards southwest of it a dollar still buys a hardcover from the volunteers of the Friends & Foundation, inside the Bausch & Lomb wing of the South Avenue library. Two-thirds of a mile due north of Greenwood, one North Street building holds two shops on two floors: Small World Books at street level and Ox Cart Books, which deals in vintage science fiction, roleplaying games and Buddhist scripture, up the stairs.
Everything else on this map is suburban, and most of it is volunteer-run. Under five miles to the south, Bookends occupies a plaza unit in Henrietta; the Friends groups in Brighton, Fairport, Pittsford and Penfield each run a permanent room, and two of them publish dated sale weeks on top of it; and close to ten miles northeast, in the village of Webster, Yesterday's Muse holds down the antiquarian trade for the county. The bookstores among them turned out together for the Roc Bookcrawl, which ran August 15 to 23, 2026 under Jenna at The Unreliable Narrator and left behind a store list that names an address, and usually a set of hours, for almost every shop involved.
Used bookstoresSmall World Books
425 North St, Rochester, NY 14605
Two bookstores share this North Street building, and this is the ground floor, run by Rocco Pellegrino, with cats loose in the aisles and a specialties line on its Yelp page that claims used books, rare editions, vinyl LPs and media of all types. Its Facebook page announced an Indie Bookstore Day sale here for Saturday, April 25, 2026 — half off the whole store plus a $10 fill-a-bag, noon to 5pm — and it had staged the same weekend with its upstairs neighbor the previous Thanksgiving. Nothing published gives a standing week: the shop keeps no website, the Facebook page carries no hours block, and the Rochester Book Crawl roster that lists it says only to check with the store, so call 585-232-6970 before you drive over.
Used bookstoresRick's Recycled Books
737 Monroe Ave, Rochester, NY 14607
A dense, cheerfully disordered room on Monroe Avenue where the sections outnumber what the floor can comfortably hold. The Rochester account Explore Rochester wrote it up on April 11, 2026 as a beautiful kind of chaos and credited it with a portable Nietzsche and a first edition of Sylvia Plath's Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. The shop states its week plainly on its own Facebook page — Tuesday through Sunday, 10am until 5 — and the organizers of the eight-day Roc Bookcrawl printed that identical span for this address in August 2026.
Hours : Tue–Sun 10am–5pm
Used bookstoresMcFall's Books
1122 Monroe Ave, Rochester, NY 14620
Secondhand and unique is the shop's own billing for this Upper Monroe storefront, which spreads from general fiction and nonfiction into young adult and children's shelving. It buys, and the terms are printed: very good condition only, meaning uncracked spines, little wear, no water damage and no writing or highlighting, paid in cash or 30 percent more taken as store credit, with an email to [email protected] and photos attached preferred before you carry anything in. Its Facebook page was posting on August 28, 2026 about another batch of 1990s and early-2000s material, while the seven-day grid with Tuesday dark comes off the store's website and the bio on its Instagram account.
Hours : Mon 11am–7pm, Wed–Sat 11am–7pm, Sun noon–6pm; closed TueWebsite Old & rare booksGreenwood Books
123 East Ave, Rochester, NY 14604
Franlee Frank has sold used and rare books in Rochester since 1998 from this East End storefront, and the shelves are picked rather than filled: fiction chosen for the reading it gives, nonfiction weighted toward philosophy, history, theology, Latin America and gardening, with Spanish, French and German among the languages stocked. The store describes her working like a sommelier, learning a regular's taste over the years and prescribing to it. Its location page and the 2026 crawl listing settle on the same five days, Tuesday until Saturday between 11am and 6pm, and the shop adds that it also opens by chance or appointment.
Hours : Tue–Sat 11am–6pm; also by chance or appointmentWebsite Used bookstoresBookends
1550 Jefferson Rd, Rochester, NY 14623
Out in Henrietta, in the Bowl-A-Roll Plaza on Jefferson Road near Winton, this is a general used bookstore whose owner states one flat exclusion on the shop's own page: he neither buys nor sells textbooks. The business description on its Yelp listing puts the opening in Pittsford village in 2002 and the move to this address in 2009, and the local directory The Local ROC, updated April 21, 2026, files it as a used bookstore and a member of the Rochester Area Booksellers Association. Days are the thing to check rather than times: the August 2026 crawl card runs Monday through Saturday from 11am to 6pm, plus Sunday from noon until 5, while the owner posted on August 15, 2026 that through football season the store would be open Sundays and closed Mondays, as it had been since February.
Antiquarian booksellerYesterday's Muse Books
32 W Main St, Ste 1, Webster, NY 14580
Out in the village of Webster, Jonathan Smalter has kept this generalist used and rare shop open since the storefront opened in December 2008, and it calls its holdings in literature and history particularly strong. He sits in the ABAA, the American antiquarian booksellers' body, and is a 2011 graduate of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, and the shop issued a catalog for the July 4, 2026 semiquincentennial alongside its Spring 2026 list. Selling here is by appointment only, through [email protected] with photos or a call to 585-265-9295, and what it turns away fills a longer paragraph than anything else described here: ex-library copies, romance, audiobooks, incomplete sets, modern hardcovers missing jackets, heavy marginalia, mold or odor, and encyclopedias, dictionaries, newspapers and magazines unless they predate the First World War.
Hours : Mon–Sat 10am–5pmWebsite Where can I find cheap used books in Rochester?
Start with the library counters. Inside the South Avenue building downtown, the library's Friends & Foundation price adult and audio titles at $1 and children's at 50 cents, rung up at the circulation desk while the store itself stays temporarily closed. Over in Brighton, the Pitlick room inside Brighton Memorial Library starts at $1 and stays open into the evening four nights a week. Add the sale weeks — Pittsford across September 10 to 12 and again from November 12 to 14 in 2026, Penfield opening to Friends members on Tuesday, September 15 and to everyone from the 16th, cutting prices in half on the 18th and finishing with a bag sale on the morning of the 19th — and the bag deals the shops themselves run, like the $10 fill-a-bag Small World Books put on for Indie Bookstore Day in April 2026.
When is the Friends of the Library sale in Rochester?
Downtown the selling is continuous rather than seasonal. The Friends & Foundation of the Rochester Public Library work through the year, from the tables in front of their store at 115 South Avenue and from an online inventory of 6,000-plus volumes carried under that store name across three secondhand marketplaces. For the weekend format you go out to the towns: the Friends of the Pittsford Library posted September 10 to 12 and November 12 to 14 for 2026, and Penfield's group has its own five-day run on the library system calendar, September 15 to 19, 2026, with the Tuesday reserved for members, half price on the Friday and a bag sale on the Saturday morning.
Which day is best for book hunting in Rochester?
Saturday, with one caveat. Every bookstore above whose week is published anywhere opens on Saturday — Greenwood, McFall's, Rick's, Before Your Quiet Eyes, Bruno's, Distant Lands, Bleak House, Ox Cart and Yesterday's Muse — whereas Tuesday takes out McFall's, Monday takes out Rick's and Bruno's, and Sunday shuts Greenwood, Ox Cart and Yesterday's Muse. The caveat is the dollar shelves at Central Library, which are gone by 5pm on Friday and unavailable at the weekend, so if you want those you need a weekday morning first and the avenue afterwards.
Where do I sell used books in Rochester?
You have three ways out of a full bookshelf here, and each one pays on a different scale. Quickest is a shop counter: McFall's on Monroe Avenue gives cash or 30 percent more as store credit for clean copies and asks for photos by email first, the Webster antiquarian takes sellers by appointment only, Distant Lands in Brighton advertises that it buys gently used books, and Bookends in Henrietta publishes exactly one line on the subject, that it neither buys nor sells textbooks. Donating is the route when the point is the shelf space rather than the money — Central, Brighton, Fairport, Pittsford and Penfield all take books, with caps ranging from two bags a day to no cap at all in Penfield. Marketplaces pay the most and punish the guesswork hardest, and closing that knowledge gap is what BiblioScan does: shoot the loaded shelf, get today's resale figure attached title by title, and lift out the handful genuinely worth an eBay listing before the remainder crosses somebody's counter.