buying books

We love books! Unfortunately not every book will find a home on our shelves.  We select books based on subject matter and condition.  No books will be purchased with underlining, highlighting, or writing in the margins.  Books issued with dust jackets should still be wearing them. 

Due to limited space and/or limited interest there are some subjects we do not purchase.  Some of these are self-help, parenting, travel guides, computer related, business, romance, and textbooks.

Please call for an appointment if you are interested in selling your books to us (401-521-5533)! There is not always a buyer in the shop, so appointments are necessary. We’d hate for you to drag a heavy box of books into the shop unnecessarily.  Save your back!

Below are the subjects we are most interested in purchasing.

Ancient History: Egypt, Rome, Greece
Anthropology
Archaeology
Art, Architecture, Photography, Film: monographs, criticism, history
Children’s books in dust jackets especially classics, award winners, series books
Cookbooks
Decorative arts: rugs, jewelry, furniture
Eastern Religion
Fiction & Drama: literary fiction, science fiction, classic mysteries, modernists, postmodernists, beats, classics
Foreign Language: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German
Gardening: history, farming, beekeeping, trees
Military History
Music: history, theory
Native American
Philosophy, Literary Criticism: especially, Adorno, Aquinas, Barthes, Benjamin, Bloom, Deleuze, Derrida, Descartes, Guattari, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Nietzsche, Steiner, Vendler, Wittgenstein
Poetry: especially, Ashbery, Baudelaire, Bishop, Bukowski, Carson, Celan, Crane, Cummings, Dickinson, Frost, H.D., Heaney, L. Hughes, Levertov, Marianne Moore, Patchen, Pessoa, Plath, Pound, Rimbaud, Sexton, Stevens, Walcott, Whitman, Yeats
Rhode Island: city and county histories, atlases and plat books
Science: nature guides, natural sciences, hard sciences, mathematics
Travel & Exploration: history and narrative

Presses:
New Directions, Black Sparrow, Grove, university presses, Loeb Library, NYRB, Routledge, Everyman’s Library, Modern Library, etc…