Where to buy used books in St. Louis

Updated 9/3/2026

The near south side carries most of it. Dunaway Books on South Grand, Hammond's on Cherokee Antique Row and Read a Book STL on Meramec Street sit inside a triangle whose longest leg measures 1.5 miles, which is about as concentrated as secondhand gets in a metro this spread out. Past those three you are driving: Left Bank Books 3.3 miles north in the Central West End, The Book House out in Maplewood, a Half Price Books counter in University City and a second arriving 11 miles further south in Mehlville, and a pair of Illinois stops eighteen and a half miles northeast across the river in Edwardsville. Where a stop sits outside the city limits, the write-up names the town in its first line.

Plan the selling half around three counters, because only three of the eleven entries below publish terms for taking books off you. Half Price Books runs a staffed buy counter for print, recorded media and select electronics brought in by the public. Left Bank Books pays store credit and never cash, at generally a tenth of cover price per title, capped at three cartons per customer each month and worked either in a booked 15-to-30-minute slot or from a box you leave behind. Dunaway Books sets the tightest conditions of the three: walk-in sellers turned away, a phone review before you load the car, forty books to a visit, and weekend appointments as the rule. The Book House puts it flatly on its policy page — no used books bought from individuals — while Read a Book STL runs a donation desk with no buying counter published behind it.

An older list will send you wrong in three places, each of them dated 2025 or later. Half Price Books has a Missouri floor arriving on Lemay Ferry Road in south county, its store page carrying a Coming Soon notice and a grand opening booked for September 4 to 7, 2026 — untouched shelves, but not before that weekend. The shop inside the Kirkwood Public Library trades as Books & Beyond, not the Greentree Books name that older directories carry. And two storefronts have lost their domains to squatters: hammondsbooks.net serves injected gambling links, and afterwordsusedbooks.com answers with an Indonesian lottery page, though both businesses trade as normal.

Spot map

The best spots

Used bookstores

Dunaway Books

3111 S Grand Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63118

On the South Grand strip at the southeast corner of Tower Grove Park, a former gallery holding what the shop's own About page counts as almost 80,000 volumes over three levels: a main floor, a mezzanine given to modern first editions, Black History and Judaica, and a labyrinthine lower level of nonfiction, science fiction and mysteries. The buying page bars walk-in sellers, asks for a phone review with staff first and keeps buying to weekend appointments, with one stated exception — Kevin, the shop's book buyer and appraiser, who takes appointments on weekdays too — while the homepage adds the ceiling of forty books a visit and says the shop prefers to look at books on Saturdays and Sundays. What it wants is scholarly, antiquarian and rare or out-of-print material plus first editions, condition weighted heavily; what it refuses outright is ex-library copies, textbooks, magazines and hardcovers without the published dust jacket. Its homepage carried an End of Summer Celebration of Love, Music and Poetry with seven poets and three musicians named on the bill, and the public Facebook event listing for it fixed the evening as Sunday, August 30, 2026.

Hours : Tue–Fri 11am–7pm, Sat 10am–7pm, Sun noon–5pm; closed MonWebsite

New, used and rare

The Book House

7352 Manchester Rd, Maplewood, MO 63143

Out in downtown Maplewood, a browser's warren of new, used, rare and unusual stock with two resident cats, Gatsby and Zelda, and a separate catalog site carrying the secondhand and rare side that the shop admits is not fully listed. Michelle founded the business in 1986 and moved it to this address in 2013, both dates off its own About page and both worth keeping straight, since the shop traded at another Manchester Road number before that move. St. Louis Magazine picked it as Bookstore to Browse in the A-List Editors' Choice Awards published August 12, 2026, crediting forty years of new and used titles across a wealth of genres. Do not turn up with boxes expecting a payout: the posted policy states flatly that the store buys no used books from individuals, accepting donations on behalf of the nonprofit Second Chapter Center instead, while owner Michelle Barron handles appraisals at $95 an hour with a $50 minimum.

Hours : Mon–Thu 11am–8pm, Fri–Sat 11am–9pm, Sun 1pm–6pmWebsite

Buy, sell and trade chain

Half Price Books U City

630 N McKnight Rd, St. Louis, MO 63132

In University City, on McKnight north of Delmar, the established half of the chain's two-store presence on this map. Anyone can carry a stack to its buy counter — print, recorded music, a defined slice of electronics, more besides — and the store page asks only that you hand the lot over and leave the sorting to staff. Its listing in early September 2026 carried a Labor Day discount reaching a fifth off almost everything, on the sales floor and on the website alike, running Friday the 4th to Monday the 7th; teachers who register for what the chain calls its annually renewable educator card keep a tenth off every in-store purchase all year, restrictions aside. Whatever the floor lacks can be pulled from any branch nationwide and held for collection at the info desk.

Hours : Mon–Sat 10am–8pm, Sun 11am–7pmWebsite

Church book fair

St. Andrew's Book Fair

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, 406 Hillsboro Ave, Edwardsville, IL 62025

A fifth of a mile from Afterwords, on the same handful of Edwardsville blocks in Illinois, an Episcopal church that lays out more than 20,000 secondhand books on four dates in 2026, sorted by category and in places alphabetized by author. Its own book-fair page names fiction in hardcover and paperback, children's, history, literature, pets, sports, regional history, cookbooks, gardening, art, biography, music, humor, large print, religion, reference and science fiction, and publishes the year in one block: February 6-7, April 24-25, August 7-8 and November 13-14, doors 3pm to 8pm on each Friday and 9am to 1pm on each Saturday. The Edwardsville Intelligencer, on July 26, 2026, supplied the rest of the brief for the August round — DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, vinyl records and puzzles beside the books, a boutique section of rare, autographed and collectible titles, no reservations needed, dealers welcome, no early sales, and cash, check or card at the till. Book donations go to the church's lower level on the first Sunday of each month between noon and 2pm, using the accessible entrance on Hillsboro Avenue.

Hours : November 13–14, 2026: Fri 3pm–8pm, Sat 9am–1pmWebsite

All spots by type

Used bookstores

New and used independent

Left Bank Books

399 N Euclid Ave, St. Louis, MO 63108

At the corner of Euclid and McPherson in the Central West End, a full-line independent whose About page counts fifty years of trading, running a secondhand mix modeled on its new stock and buying it over the counter for store credit only, generally 10 percent of a title's cover price, three cartons to a customer each month. Booked sessions last 15 to 30 minutes on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays and you wait while the buyers work, but books brought in outside those slots can simply be left: the shop says it will get back to you once the buy is finished, usually within a couple of days, and its FAQ asks you to call (314) 367-6731 first, since the back room sometimes overfills. Westerns, computer books, textbooks, travel guides, volume sets, single-issue comics, magazines and audiobooks are ruled out before you pack, and for anything genuinely old the shop hands over two names of its own, pointing at Dunaway Books and Hammonds. Read the schedule twice: the body of the hours page puts Monday through Saturday at 10am–8pm with Sunday at 11am–6pm, while the footer of that same page puts Sunday at 10am–6pm, and the calendar beside it had Aiden Thomas booked in for September 8, 2026.

Website

Donation-fed secondhand shop

Read a Book STL

3125 Meramec St, St. Louis, MO 63118

Down in Dutchtown, a secondhand shop co-owned by Brian and Ellen Cheli whose stated mission is salvaging books and keeping knowledge affordable, with a thin run of new titles and special orders behind that. The shelves are fed by donations rather than a buy counter: drop-offs run Wednesday to Friday from noon to 6 and Sunday from 9 to 3, the wanted list leans to banned books, BIPOC authors and LGBTQIA+ titles, graphic novels, urban fiction, classics, horror, philosophy and poetry, and the refusal list covers encyclopedias, magazines, Reader's Digest, National Geographic and any textbook published before 2015. Dutchtown Main Streets named the shop among its 2025 façade grant recipients in a piece published December 15, 2025, funding a shaded awning over the sidewalk out front. Its own calendar lists six book clubs and a craft night inside a single August — decolonial dialogue, existentialist café, esoteric, anti-monopoly localism, Asian American and Black Women in STL — which says more about what this neighborhood reads than any shelf survey would.

Hours : Wed–Sat noon–6pm, Sun 9am–3pm; closed Mon–TueWebsite

Antiquarian and vintage dealer

Hammond's Antiques & Books

1939 Cherokee St, St. Louis, MO 63118

An 1896 building on Cherokee Antique Row holding around 60,000 books, some rare and most long out of print, shelved in among Art Deco, posters and prints, paper dolls and a hoard of more than 200,000 pieces of vintage paper running from the 1850s to the 1960s. The Cherokee Antique Row merchants' directory, whose entry for the shop carries a July 30, 2026 timestamp, tells the origin story: Jovanka Hammond assembled the Deco inventory first, and her brother and partner Kenz, already working in the book trade, argued that two readers ought to be running a bookstore. Expect art and architecture, decorated bindings and nice editions, and a range the owner herself frames as running from the ten-dollar reading copy to the eight-hundred-dollar collector piece. Two cautions before you build a day around it: the shop puts out no opening grid that can be relied on anywhere, and hammondsbooks.net — the address carried on the shop's listings — has been injected with online-casino links, so the number worth trying is the (314) 776-4737 that Left Bank Books prints when it sends collectors over, since third-party directories carry a different one.

Buy, sell and trade chain

Half Price Books Lemay Ferry

4491 Lemay Ferry Rd, St. Louis, MO 63129

South county, in Mehlville on Lemay Ferry Road, and not trading yet: the store page runs a Coming Soon notice promising new bestsellers beside used and rare stock, out-of-print books, movies and music, with a Grand Opening Celebration billed for Friday, September 4 through Monday, September 7, 2026. The first hundred people through the door at 9am on each of those four days are promised a free tote bag and a $5 gift card, and one tote each day is to hold a $100 card. The seven-day grid posted ahead of the opening matches the University City branch exactly, and the chain's store finder measures 11.2 miles between the two. Until those doors part, the McKnight Road branch is the sole Half Price Books counter on this map, so read the times below as the schedule the company has published rather than one anybody has walked into.

Hours : Mon–Sat 10am–8pm, Sun 11am–7pmWebsite

Independent with a used section

Afterwords Books

441 E Vandalia St, Edwardsville, IL 62025

Over the river in Edwardsville, Illinois, eighteen and a half miles from downtown St. Louis, a family-run independent that shelves secondhand next to new, alongside story times for children, special events, educational toys and gifts made by local artisans. The Edwardsville Intelligencer, on April 23, 2026, had owner LuAnn Locke marking the shop's seventeenth anniversary that May and putting books out at a dollar or less for a sidewalk sale on Saturday, April 25. Its own posted hours contradict each other: the front page gives Wednesday to Friday 10am to 5pm plus Saturdays 10am to 3pm, while the booking widget elsewhere on the site gives Wednesday to Friday 10am to 5pm with Saturday closed, so call (618) 655-0355 before you commit the crossing. One more trap: afterwordsusedbooks.com, the address older directories and map records hold for this shop, has been taken over and serves Indonesian gambling pages — afterwordsbooks.com is the live one.

Website

Library book sales

Library gift shop

Books & Beyond

Kirkwood Public Library, 140 E Jefferson Ave, Kirkwood, MO 63122

In Kirkwood, the public library keeps a shop managed and staffed entirely by volunteers on its main level, just inside the entrance opposite the customer service desk, and every dollar taken there goes back into the library. The books are secondhand, adult and children's, fiction and non-fiction, described by the library as priced at a deep discount; the rest of the floor space goes to hand-crafted items, greeting cards and gifts, so a visit is a skim and not an afternoon. The library refreshed the shop's page in June 2026, posting the grid below beside a photograph of the shelves and flagging that those times are subject to change. Older lists file the place under Greentree Books, the name the Webster-Kirkwood Times traced to a 1997 opening; donations go into a red wagon near the computer lab, in loads small enough to fit it.

Hours : Mon–Thu 10am–6pm, Fri–Sat 10am–4pm, Sun 2pm–4pmWebsite

Book fairs

Church book sale

Kirkwood UCC Bookstore

Kirkwood United Church of Christ, 1603 Dougherty Ferry Rd, Kirkwood, MO 63122

Also in Kirkwood, a little over a mile and a half west of the library, a church that clears a room of donated books, puzzles, DVDs and CDs on single mornings instead of keeping a shop open. The date posted on its own page is Saturday, October 17, 2026, 9am to noon, cash only, with fresh items put out on the shelves ahead of each one. Pricing is flat and published: $4 a hardback, $3 a paperback, $3 for a children's hardback, $1 for a children's paperback, $4 a jigsaw, $1 or $2 for a DVD or CD depending on whether it is a single or a set, 50 cents for anything carrying a green dot, and no charge whatsoever for Bibles, English dictionaries and yellow-dot stock. What it asks in return is recent donations, naming history, politics, finance, business, biography, memoir and fiction published within the last five years.

Hours : October 17, 2026: 9am–noonWebsite

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.

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Local sourcing tips

One whole category is missing from this list on purpose. No thrift or charity chain in the metro publishes what sits on its book shelves store by store: MERS Goodwill hides its branches behind a radius search that returns a single set of chain-wide opening hours and nothing whatsoever about stock, and the third-party service directories that do mention books under individual branches are describing donation intake, not a sales floor. That does not make a Goodwill afternoon pointless, but it does mean you cannot plan one from a screen — treat those stops as improvisation between the eleven addresses above rather than as a route.
The tightest circuit in this guide belongs to the near south side, where three of the eleven addresses make a triangle measuring 1.5 miles along its longest leg and all three trade on Saturday afternoons. The Cherokee Antique Row directory counts two dozen antique, vintage and specialty shops in the six blocks between Jefferson and Lemp, so the Hammond's leg turns into a longer crawl whether you planned one or not. Push 3.3 miles north to Left Bank Books in the Central West End and you have covered the whole city half of this list in an afternoon.
Two of the eleven stops sit in Illinois and they are effectively a single trip. Afterwords Books and the St. Andrew's book fair stand a fifth of a mile apart in Edwardsville, roughly nineteen miles northeast of downtown, which makes the fair weekend of November 13 and 14 the obvious day to make that crossing rather than a random Wednesday. Afterwords opens Wednesday to Friday either way, and the fair runs Friday afternoon into Saturday lunchtime, so one long Friday covers the pair. Do not count on selling into that trip, though: the shop advertises no trade terms on its own website, and its Facebook page carries an announcement ending its trade-for-credit program on an August 1 and a separate post declaring the same program back, neither of them dated where you can read it.
Half Price Books lists four Missouri addresses and files all four under St. Louis on its own state page, but only two fall inside the map above — and one of those two, Lemay Ferry, does not unlock before its September 4-to-7 opening weekend in 2026. The others are HPB Chesterfield at 1664 Clarkson Road and HPB St Charles at 2107 Zumbehl Road, which the chain's store finder places 15.8 and 22.4 miles from the Lemay Ferry site respectively — worth the detour only if the day already takes you west or across the Missouri River. Each carries a grid on its own store page; read it before setting off, since only the two inside this guide have their times printed above.
Three web addresses in older roundups lead nowhere useful. Subterranean Books on the Delmar Loop says on its own About page that one thing you will not find there is used books, whatever the internet may have told you, and that it phased that segment out somewhere around 2004. The other two are hijacked domains rather than closed shops: hammondsbooks.net, carried on Hammond's own directory entries, holds injected online-casino links, and afterwordsusedbooks.com, the address OpenStreetMap keeps for Afterwords Books, resolves to an Indonesian lottery site. Both of those businesses trade normally; it is only the URLs that are gone, and afterwordsbooks.com is the working one.
The organized sales in this metro are church and library affairs rather than one civic set piece, so the calendar matters more than the map. Kirkwood United Church of Christ throws its book room open for three hours on the morning of October 17, 2026, cash in hand. St. Andrew's in Edwardsville closes the year on November 13 and 14. Books & Beyond inside the Kirkwood library is the one you can walk into on an ordinary weekday. And the Noble Neighbor used book sale, run by the nonprofit arm of The Novel Neighbor at 7905 Big Bend Boulevard in Webster Groves, last appears on the nonprofit's own events page as May 30, 2026, 10am to 3pm, with donations closing the day before — check that page for the following date rather than assuming one.

Frequently asked questions

Where can I find cheap used books in St. Louis?

The floor sits at the church tables. Kirkwood United Church of Christ posts $4 for a hardback, $3 for a paperback, $3 and $1 for children's hardbacks and paperbacks, 50 cents for green-dot stock and no charge on Bibles and English dictionaries, cash only, on the morning of Saturday, October 17, 2026. The St. Andrew's fair over in Edwardsville puts more than 20,000 secondhand titles on tables across November 13 and 14. For a day that is not a Saturday morning, Books & Beyond inside the Kirkwood Public Library prices its used adult and children's shelves at what the library terms a deep discount and unlocks on all seven days, while Read a Book STL in Dutchtown prices a donation-fed floor for a neighborhood rather than for collectors.

Where do I sell used books in St. Louis?

The answer turns on what the carton holds. Everyday fiction, media and the bulk of a house clearance belong at the Half Price Books buy counter on McKnight in University City, whose store page wants nothing beyond the whole stack across the desk for staff to work through; the Lemay Ferry counter down in south county joins it the moment that branch opens, over Labor Day weekend 2026. Trade-quality current titles suit Left Bank Books, which pays around 10 percent of cover in store credit, either in a booked Thursday, Saturday or Sunday session or against a carton dropped off and answered by phone a couple of days afterwards. Anything scholarly, antiquarian, rare, out-of-print or a first edition belongs with Dunaway Books, which bars walk-in sellers and holds a visit to forty books — which is exactly why triage pays: photograph a loaded shelf head-on and BiblioScan will attach a resale figure to each spine it can make out, and the spread tells you which titles justify the drive to South Grand and which are simply weight for a chain counter.

Which day is best for book hunting in St. Louis?

Saturday, and by a distance. Every shop on this list that publishes a schedule opens on a Saturday, Half Price Books in University City runs from 10am until 8pm, Dunaway starts at 10am rather than its weekday 11am, and the two Illinois fair dates and the Kirkwood church morning all fall on one. Sunday is the workable second: Dunaway, Read a Book STL, Left Bank and The Book House all trade, and Books & Beyond opens a short 2pm to 4pm window. Monday and Tuesday are the thin days rather than dead ones — Dunaway, Read a Book STL and Afterwords over in Illinois are all shut, but The Book House, Left Bank, Books & Beyond and the University City buy counter keep normal hours.

When is the Friends of the Library sale in St. Louis?

There is no city-limits event to circle. At St. Louis Public Library, becoming a Friend is a membership that funds programs — 1000 Books Before Kindergarten, the summer camps, the technology sessions — and no sale calendar hangs off it; at St. Louis County Library the equivalent membership sits under the library's Foundation, whose public events page is built around its author series rather than tables of donated stock. The standing substitute is in Kirkwood, where the public library's volunteer-run Books & Beyond shop sells secondhand books at a deep discount seven days a week, with the longest openings early in the week and only a two-hour window on Sunday afternoon. For dated sales you go to the churches: Kirkwood United Church of Christ on October 17, 2026, and St. Andrew's in Edwardsville, Illinois on November 13 and 14.

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