Westsider Rare and Used Books

Bibliophiles should clear their schedules before hitting this bilevel bookshop: Westsider puts every square inch of its limited real estate to use, haphazardly double-shelving gently used tomes from floor to ceiling. If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and dig, you’ll unearth some real gems at about half the cover price—the eclectic selection includes everything from photography and art titles to cookbooks and French literature, though the sci-fi, horror and mystery sections are particularly solid. Lazy bones can rifle through the $1 books, $3 VHS tapes and $5 DVDs on shelves outside, though they’ll miss out on the old-school charm of precarious sliding ladders and the intoxicating smell of musty pages indoors. The mezzanine houses rare books, like a signed, leatherbound first edition of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried ($250), plus a random assortment of vintage postcards. A music annex on 72nd Street is just as overstuffed with more than 30,000 rock and jazz LPs, scores and sheet music, books on performance art, and vintage turntables for under $200.