The Paperback Exchange

by Theoharides

In college, I had the opportunity to take a creative non-fiction class called Location, Location, Location. The point of the class was that when it came to writing, location, or setting the scene, is everything. The same cannot be said about the places that hold all that wonderfully located writing–namely used bookstores.  The Paperback Exchange, which is located on the corner of 50th and Penn in Southwest Minneapolis, nestled between an out-of-business coffee shop and a fancy-pants French restaurant, doesn’t seem like the likeliest place for a great used book store. However, it is one of the best the Twin Cities have to offer.

Great used book stores are surprisingly difficult to find. All too often, mediocre establishments rely on prime real-estate, and a trendy, we’re-hip-’cause-we’re-square attitude. They fill their store windows with recently released rarities to suck shoppers in, play off-beat jazz to incite spending, and give off the perpetual vibe that unless you’ve read Flaubert’s entire catalog you’re not worth their precious time.

The Paperback Exchange is quite the opposite. Their store front is decidedly modest, and the people working the register emit an aura that is more ‘Amelia Bedelia meets menopause’ then ‘James Dean learns how to read.’ They have a confusing discount system, in which all books are 50% off their back cover prices, unless you have store credit in which case they are 70% off. Furthermore, the layout of the book shelves seem counterintuitive  to the process of book buying (romance novels bordered by crime serials, histories rubbing elbows with young adults). But that is exactly how it should be. There are few things I enjoy more than spending an afternoon sifting through stack-after-stack of cheap paperbacks, in search of that one book I never knew I needed until just this moment. All too often, shopping has become a manicured process. Our options are laid out in front of us. They are clean. They are placed on newly built shelves. And they are waiting for us. When I want that, I can just visit Amazon.com. When I want a good search, I go to the The Paperback Exchange.