Rae's Book Exchange

Since moving to Spokane, every time I've driven up N Division I've seen the sign for Rae's Book Exchange. And each time I've seen the sign, I've felt guilty for not being able to muster sufficient curiosity to stop in. But there was a quality the place was sorely lacking — a charm, an allure, a distinctiveness — and so, until that day when my growing guilt and curiosity managed to coincide with some time to kill between appointments, there was little to compel me to turn into that vast expanse of parking lot.


It's fitting, not least from a thematic standpoint, to keep in mind the old axiom that a book shouldn't be judged by its cover. The bookstore's façade isn't a pretty one: a faded sign, the letters weathered and peeling, some odd cellophane hanging in the window like it's there to keep out feeble draughts. The store itself is one tiny anonymous sliver among a seedy, sprawling, strip mall, bookended to the north by the poor man's Macy's, aka K-mart, and to the south by the really poor man's dollar store, aka the Dollar Tree.

But is it pretty on the inside?

First, some history. If I can recall without too much distortion the details related by the guarded but generally amiable assistant, it runs like this. Twenty-five years ago, the Book Exchange was opened by a local couple, and the N Division location was one of a trio of Book Exchange stores throughout Spokane. Ten years ago, the couple closed two of the shops, sold the third to another bookseller (Rae, presumably), and decamped to Montana (Butte? Billings? I'm not sure if I was told the city or have simply forgotten it), taking their surplus stock and using it to establish a new bookstore in The Treasure State. In the decade since, Rae's has pottered along and weathered all the period's economic storms, taking used books at a certain fraction of their cover price and selling them at a higher fraction of the cover price.

Fine, but is it pretty on the inside?

In a word, no.

Nor is it in any other way remarkable. The selection of books was modest and ordinary, the usual secondhand bookstore fare of crime thrillers, overhyped/overstocked trendy fiction, a revolving display of $1 Dover Thrift Editions, Kitty Kelley biographies, and old (in the sense of being faded and outdated rather than antique) versions of popular classics: Dickens, Austen, Dostoyevsky (Constance Garnett's translations, if that's any indication), and the like.


Slightly larger were the gardening and cooking sections; there would, I imagine, be plenty on offer for those interested in either of these genres. But what I found was that, for literary fiction, history, and biography, the store wasn't conducive to either of my two modes of book shopping: hunting for specific titles or aimless browsing with the hopes of a thrilling discovery. It was more like a collection of runners-up and second-bests, books that you kind of maybe halfheartedly wanted to read at one point in the distant past and might as well buy since you're here and don't want to leave empty-handed because, after all, you did make the effort to turn into the expanse of parking lot. This may be one category of books that's omitted from If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.

In the end we took home two books of children's fairy tales — one of which was bound upside down, so that the book opened from the back cover — and a well-used copy of a Bloom County anthology called Classics of Western Literature, which only duplicated the strips that were published in other collections that I already own. It was a completist's impulse buy. All told it cost $28, which, for a used bookstore, seems on the pricey side.

On the way out, a woman stopped me in the parking lot and urged me to visit the Book Traders on Garland Avenue. So many books you could barely pass through the front door, she said. Having just walked out of a bookstore, that image shouldn't have sounded as enticing as it did.