Walls of Books Issaquah

Walls of Books gave Issaquah a general bookstore again, and the Seattle Times covered its arrival under a headline about the bookstore shaped hole in local readers' hearts. Gail Vaughn owns it. It is her second store after Covington, and the two of them are the only Walls of Books locations west of the Rockies, which makes the Issaquah shop a genuine outlier on a map otherwise concentrated in the South.

The front of the room is new stock: bestsellers, hardcover releases, puzzles, board games, and the mugs and socks that bookshops sell to people buying gifts. Behind that, the bulk of the floor is used paperbacks priced to be bought in armfuls, across every genre, on tall white shelving. There is a trade in counter too, paying up to half the in stock price in credit for books brought back, which is what keeps the used shelves turning over.

Hours are 10 AM to 6 PM daily, running to 7 PM on Saturdays. It sits in the Gilman Boulevard retail strip, on the same run as Small Threads for Kids and a short drive from Gilman Village.