Powell’s City of Books

Jill's Journal: I’m a sucker for a good bookstore. Rob’s a sucker for a good bookstore. The girls are especially suckers for a good bookstore. Yet, until after we’d visited Powell’s City of Books, I didn’t quite realize we were at a place of pilgrimage for book lovers. (Seriously, people come to Portland just for Powell’s).


The sandstone “column” is a stack of eight of the world’s great books. On the base, in Latin, is written, “Buy the book, read the book, enjoy the book, sell the book.”

 There were hints of book mecca before our visit. A couple of weeks before we arrived in Portland, someone had sent me a link to the world’s “most inspiring bookstores.” Powell’s City of Books was on it. Then I saw a USA Today list of America’s 10 best bookstores. Again, Powell’s was on it. Finally, I looked on “Yelp,” a site whose reviews are generally dead on. There were close to 1,000 reviews with a rank of five starts (out of five). They were all right.

Powell’s City of Books is nothing short of amazing. It’s an entire city block times four (four floors). Oh, and that still wasn’t enough floor space, so they spilled over into a building across the street as well. It’s overwhelming.

This is small fraction of the children's section.

They’re the largest independent bookstore in the world and are unique in that they shelve new and used books side-by-side. They estimate their inventory at four million books. If you can’t find it here, it’s likely you can’t find it anywhere. They’re so big that it’s advised you pick up a map when you walk in the door. It’s like Disneyland for book lovers.

Especially tantalizing was their rare book room. That little book on the right? It had a price tag of $11,500 (and it wasn’t the most expensive one we saw!). The most valuable title at Powell’s is currently a two-volume first edition of Journals of Lewis and Clark. Only 23 of the 1,417 printed in 1814 are known to exist and only a couple are in private hands. The price? A whopping $350,000. (Not surprisingly, we didn’t spot it on the shelves!).

This is the oldest book at Powell’s. Titled De Bello Judaica (or The Jewish War) and priced at $12,500, it was printed in 1480 during the first 50 years of modern printing (shortly after Gutenberg began using movable type).

What a place.