Welcome to Green Door Books!

Books, Coffee, Music & More

Whew! Boy, are we glad to finally be moved! We've been working hard to get everything ready for you to join us for great books, great coffee and teas, great pastries and goodies, and great conversation. We're ready to get this show on the road!

We want to welcome you to our place. We hope that you'll find it a relaxing, friendly place to come and shop, to browse and meet friends, to de-stress and unwind, or to charge up your batteries for the next round.

Green Door Books is a bookstore and a coffee cafe. We sell the very best gourmet coffees and teas that we can find, as well as delicious goodies, prepared fresh daily. And we have a huge (and growing!) selection of used and new books for you to lose yourself in for a while. Grab a cup of coffee and something to nibble, find a few books and a comfy chair, and treat yourself!

We love books; we hope you do, too. We love bookstores, and we hope you do, too. We love coffee shops, and we hope you do, too. If you can think of something we could do to make your experience here better, please, please, please let us know. We're eager to learn if we're not meeting your expectations.

Here are some answers to questions we get frequently:

1) How many books do you have?

We have around 18,000 books currently displayed in the store. Our main warehouse, just a few blocks away, has over 70,000 books in storage, waiting for shelf space to open up. In addition, we sell a good many books online at half.com and Amazon.com, and these are housed in the warehouse as well.

2) Where do you get all these books from?

We primarily buy books in large quantities, frequently from other book dealers who are retiring or getting out of the business for one reason or another.

We also take books in on trade for store credits, and this helps keep our stock fresh and circulating.

3) Do you have...?

Maybe; we'll do our best to help you locate any book that we have. However, we have a great many more books than any of us have managed to keep all in our heads, yet. And there's that warehouse... So you may have to look around on your own some and try to find cool stuff you're looking for. But that's part of the fun!

4) Will you special-order books? Can you find a book for me?

Absolutely! Just let us know what you want and we'll try to get it. We know that for new books, or for books currently in print, chances are good that you can find them yourself at Amazon.com or Powell's. But we'll be more than happy to get it for you if you prefer us to do the looking around.

If you're looking for rare or unusual or out-of-print books, we can probably be more useful. If you're looking for something that's out of print, we can help you locate it, and will even order it for you.

5) Why "Green Door Books", when your front door is metal?

Well, the front door at our original little store was a wonderful old green, and we just liked the name. We've got a couple over the front checkout counter to commemorate them.

6) Do you take trade-ins?

We certainly do! The way it works most of the time is pretty simple. we give you store credit for half of what we can sell a book for. There are a few exceptions (see below), but just as an example: If you bring us a good condition, recent paperback which retails for $6.99, we would normally sell that in our store for $3.50 (half the cover price). Therefore, we would offer you $1.75 in store credit for that book.

Now for the exceptions. We sometimes adjust the price we can offer you for books that are harder to sell, or that we're not sure about. For most recent books, that's not necessary, but for some older or more obscure or less popular items, we will do that. You.re never obligated to take what we offer you for credit; we know you may just want to check and see what you could get for a book.

There are a few authors who are massively popular in retail stores, but who simply do not sell well at all in used book stores. We haven't figured out why that is, but there are several that crop up frequently, all of which sell like hotcakes new, and hardly at all used. Current sloooooooow store sellers are: Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Danielle Steele, and Stephen King. In each case, these authors make zillions of new book sales; hardly any used book sales. We already have so many books by these authors that we really can't give anything for more of them at the moment.

We do take donations, of anything that even looks like a book. So if you brought in some books that we couldn't give you any credit for, you're still welcome to leave them here. Sometimes you just need some shelf space, and we'll gratefully take them off your hands for you.

7) What are these bargain books on the special shelf in the store?

We have a special section for books that are no longer in a condition that we feel is sellable as normal inventory, but that still have all their pages intact and are easily readable. So it's a very, very cheap way to try out an author or a book that you might be considering getting, and if you like it, you can buy a better copy later. If you don't, it cost you no more than giant gumball in the local candy machine.

8) Where are your prices? How come there aren't price stickers on your books? Why don't you honor the price sticker I found on the back?

We try to make our pricing system flexible, but not too complicated. Basically, there are four "classes" of books that we sell.

• Gently used - This is our normal, run-of-the-mill used book. It may be in new condition, all the way down to fairly worn. Prices on these are half the cover price, with ONE exception . Book Club Editions of hardback books are $3.00 (same as ex-library hardback books).
• Ex-library books - These are books which were once circulated in a public library of some kind (municipal, school, military, etc.). They are easily recognizable by either the normal library sticker on the spine, the library ownership stamps inside or on the page edges, or the checkout card and envelope many of them have inside the back cover. Ex-library books are $1 for paperbacks and $3 for hardbacks.
• Rare and Vintage books - These are books which are harder to find than normal, and which have a value above what we normally would sell it for. This may be an edition that is autographed, specially bound, a first edition that is uncommon, older, or generally hard to come by. Prices for these will be indicated by a small post-it note inside the front cover.
• Bargain books - Complete and readable, but generally in rough shape. These are always $0.25, and are an excellent way to check out an author or book that you're curious about, but don't know if you'll like.

As for the price stickers you find on some of the books, we didn't put them there, and so we don't consider them part of our pricing. We don't "sticker" our books, for a number of reasons. Perhaps the most important one is that trying to get sticker goo off a book has always been a pet peeve of one of the owners, and we didn't want to contribute to that practice. :)

9) Do you have any new books?

We do, actually, but we don't distinguish them from the used ones. They're sold at the same prices as our used books (half the cover, generally), and share shelf space with them. At first, we separated them out, but there didn't seem to be much point to it.

10) Do you sell Audio tapes?

We have a collection of new (still shrink-wrapped) books on tape. We do not take these back in on trade, and we're not looking for used audio books.

11) Do you sell CDs or DVDs?

We are considering adding used CDs and DVDs, but would like your feedback on it. If you'd like for us to add these, let us know what you think.

12) Can I order off your web site?

We don't have e-commerce set up just yet on our web site. It's coming, but it's not ready yet. However, you can buy from our half.com listings, or our Amazon.com store.

While there may be some overlap of books listed online and books in the store, for the most part what you'll find listed online is different than what is on our shelves.

13) Do you sell T-shirts/coffee mugs/tattoos/cattle brands/neckties?

Oh, yeah. Click right on over to Green Door Books Goodies and buy, Buy, BUY!

14) Are you hiring?

Sometimes, sometimes not. We don't interview via phone or walk-ins. If you'd like to be considered next time we have an opening, write us a letter explaining what you'd like to do and why you'd like to work here. Tell us what you've done and what you enjoyed and what your goals are. Don't send us a resume; they're boring and don't really tell us much about you. We're a bookstore, and we're looking for people who like books and words. If that's you, we'll get a pretty good idea when we read your letter.

15) What is the answer?

42. We kind of figured everybody knew that by now.