Conveniently located in the center of beautiful, lively Iowa City, The Book Shop offers more than three hundred fifty thousand titles, free want list maintenance and book-finding services, and we buy, trade, appraise, adopt and recycle books. Browsers have been known to spend the day perusing our shelves for entertaining morsels, and our free coffee bar and cookie jar offer further temptation.

Beginning with our first store in 1969, we concentrated on collecting, trading and finding for our clients beautiful first edition nineteenth and twentieth-century prose and poetry. But, driven by customer requests, since 1990 our non-fiction selections have grown to more than quadrulpe the size of our fiction collection. Count on us now for every category of non-fiction, as well as your favorite fiction genres that include Contemporary and Classic Literature, Adventure, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery and Science Fiction.

In May of 1986, we laid claim to a wee two-story bungalow that originally served as a Pony Express and stage coach layover station. Within the shell of this small slice of history -- where the restoration and repair never end, but at least the costs and time demands are staggering -- we've built a true brick-and-mortar store which, after great debate and untold hours of research, we decided to call, cleverly, The Book Shop.

Service, selection and a friendly, relaxed atmosphere are the foundations upon which we created our physical store. In addition to answering our in-store clients' book needs, we host online auctions and sell world-wide via most every established internet bookselling0 venue. Our customers quite hearteningly agree that thanks to the research required to balance online and walk-in sales, our pricing is both realistic and welcome.

After first building a new warehouse and sorting facility, we've become the hub of local book recycling. Unsaleable books that cannot be donated to libraries, shelters, care or confinement facilities are now shuttled to recyclers rather than becoming landfill.

Following years of anticipation, we've begun the second phase of remodeling our facility, starting with a sheltering new portico and entryway. The landscaping to the perimeter of our historic building and the graduated walkway project linking our front and rear entrances have also been completed. The foundation for our enlarged outdoor seating area is about to be poured. And, a handsome new front door -- another long-term handworked project -- is in the works, as are skylights that will accent our new roof. The tornado that ripped up the building in April of 2006 set our schedule and many of our plans back but we look at the destruction and recovery as only a detour on the road to a better place.

On the acquisitions front, since May 2004 we've taken in more than one hundred fifty thousand exciting new titles! All of our staff are busy grading and cataloging to make them accessible both in the store and online. These last few years represent our busiest buying seasons ever. We've had to contract for additional storage to accommodate the roughly fifty-two hundred cartons of books we're only beginning to appraise. While our inventory has always been dynamic, with so many new works to shelve our customers discover great new titles every time they drop in.

While work on our physical store never ends -- we simply can't build bookshelves fast enough -- the same is true for cataloging titles for our website. We're thrilled to announce that by mid-2008 surfing visitors will be able to search through our entire cataloged inventory via our online retail store.

Because we see our booksite as the inevitable next-step in online bookselling, we're taking our time with this project to do it correctly. And because we're designing our booksite with every what if in mind, we have great news for every bookseller who wants his or her own online bookstore. In partnership with our friend Hart Larew we're templatizing every element of the search, display, upload, purchase and invoice functionality to allow booksellers to have their own customized booksite. Soon, booksellers won't have to endlessly rent or spend the next several years learning dynamic hypertext programming to have their own site. Soon, based on the work to which we've devoted the last three years, booksellers will be able to own their own booksite for less than has ever before been possible. Read more about this wonderful opportunity on our Web Development page.

Meanwhile, the renovations to our brick-and-mortar store continue. The planned redesign of our downstairs level will expand our total sales floor and shelving capacity by an extremely welcome fifty percent.

Our goal at The Book Shop is simple. We're readers, too. We know what it's like to run out of things that we can't wait to read. And, we know how great it feels when a friend helps you find a book that turns out to be wonderful. We welcome the opportunity to become that kind of friend to you. If you're ever in Iowa City we hope you'll stop in and visit.

If we may be of service, please click here to email us. Thank you for visiting our website.