Powell's: The Bookstore That Ate a City Block

Powell's City of Books makes a claim few businesses dare: the largest independent bookstore in the world, new and used together. The numbers behind the claim have been repeated so often they are civic facts now — a full city block at West Burnside and Northwest 10th, roughly a million books on the shelves, rooms color-coded like a subway map because the store is large enough to require one.

The store grew from a Chicago transplant's used-book shop into its current form through the 1970s and beyond, and its central heresy remains the shelving: new and used copies of the same title sit side by side, so a first printing and a fresh paperback share a spine's width. For readers, that shelving policy collapsed the wall between the bookstore and the library sale, and it made browsing Powell's an act of archaeology as much as shopping.

The building cooperates with the myth. The Burnside entrance passes under the 'Powell's City of Books' sign into the Gold Room's new releases; the rooms deepen — literature in one color, the vast sci-fi holdings in another, the Rare Book Room upstairs where the store's treasures sit in climate-controlled patience. Author readings run nearly nightly in the store's events space, free, first-come, a standing piece of Portland's literary infrastructure.

The neighborhood grew up around the store as much as the store grew into the neighborhood. The Pearl District's warehouses turned galleries and lofts over the same decades, and Powell's remained the anchor tenant of the district's self-image — the proof that Portland's ambitions ran to paper as much as to software or shoes.

November is the store's natural season: rain at the windows, the full staff picks of the year going up, and the holiday tables under construction. Bring a list and the store will honor half of it. The other half is what the building is for.