Where to buy used books in San Francisco

Updated 9/3/2026

Spot map

The best spots

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Local sourcing tips

• Credit is the default currency in this city and cash is the exception, so decide which you want before loading the car. Green Apple on Clement pays either one, ten in the morning until six at night, closed to sellers only on Christmas Eve and New Year's Day, and adds half again if you take trade toward used stock. Dog Eared and Fabulosa both reserve cash for genuinely desirable copies and hand out slips for everything else, again with the same 50 percent uplift for choosing paper. Russian Hill will pay cash across the counter but writes a check for a house call, and it keeps no fixed buying window at all, so nothing gets held overnight and one telephone call decides whether the trip is worth making.
• Cheapest of all in San Francisco are the library volunteers, whose operation has three surfaces. The shop off 30 Grove Street trades all week inside the Main Library; on Wednesdays the same people move onto the Larkin Street steps with hardcovers at $6, trade paperbacks at $5, kids and mass-market at $3 and discs at $2; and once a month the Potrero Hill donation center opens its garage for two afternoons. What reaches those tables is priced off the donation pile rather than off a marketplace, which is the reason to walk them. One caveat the Friends state themselves: they examine donations for rare and collectible titles and sell those through their own online storefronts before anything reaches a table.
• Four of the most useful rooms in this guide are not rooms you can walk into. Bolerium sits on the third floor at 17th and Mission and takes appointments only, asking you to draw a want list from its catalog because most shelves are no longer browsable. Kayo on Post Street opens by appointment or happenstance, which means knock if the lights are on. Argonaut on Sutter works to the same arrangement, and John Windle keeps weekday office hours at 49 Geary but tells you plainly to phone first. Budget a morning of calls before a downtown day or you will walk past all four without knowing it.
• This guide stops at the water. Oakland and Berkeley carry a deep secondhand scene of their own, and this site treats them as cities in their own right rather than folding them in here; BART crosses in a single ride from Civic Center or 16th Street. If you have a weekend, work the city on one day and the East Bay on the other instead of trying to bridge them at rush hour.
• Work in clusters instead of ticking off a list, because the transit between them eats the day. The Mission gives you Dog Eared, Community Thrift, Bolerium and Adobe inside a short walk of the 16th Street and 24th Street BART platforms, with Omnivore a climb west into Noe Valley. Civic Center and Lower Nob Hill put the Friends' shop, Kayo, Argonaut and John Windle inside a four-block square. The Richmond and the Inner Sunset hold one Green Apple each and almost nothing else, so pair those two and treat the trip as its own outing.
• Read the refusal lists before you haul anything anywhere, because they overlap almost exactly. Textbooks, computer manuals, out-of-date travel guides, hardcover mysteries and anything underlined, highlighted, water-damaged or missing a jacket get turned away at Green Apple, Dog Eared, Russian Hill and Fabulosa alike. Green Apple additionally declines CDs, LPs, stapled comics, periodicals, encyclopedias and ex-library copies, and Russian Hill takes no discs or cassettes of any kind. The Friends of the SFPL publish their own donation exclusions, which rule out mold, tobacco smell, magazines and academic journals, VHS and cassette tapes, and school reading sets.

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