When I wrote my previous post ‘The Death of Book Exchanges’ in 2000, I thought I was just coming to terms with their limited lives in the singular. I didn’t think the whole category of shop would face virtual extinction. But now, in 2026, few suburban book exchanges remain. I wonder if it reflects my grandparents’ generation dying off; they almost all read for recreation, especially the mass market paperbacks book exchanges specialised in. Another factor: I think public libraries started holding more of those books too – romance, westerns, science fiction. (I remember as a kid when ‘paperbacks’ at Collie library were a small separate section and not a proper part of the collection – uncatalogued, not covered and probably donated.) Then there’s rising shopping centre rents, driving out everything but the big chains. And, finally, in the 2010s many genre readers switched to Kindle.

In my post I didn’t mention a more formative book exchange for me in Collie. It was a side room in the barber shop inside the old Gommes Shoex arcade. It smelt, gloriously, of cigarettes and hair product. I went to it often between 1990 and 1996, sneaking past the barber at work to browse in the dim light. In my memory the books were arranged quite randomly and squeezed into every inch of that room. If you kept looking you might come across all sorts of things. At first I was just after Phantom comics and would regularly catch sight of the distinctive orange logo on a blue background. Such joy to find one I didn’t have. Later, I bought my first science fiction books. It’s where I found Philip K Dick’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall, and The Best of Galaxy volume 2, three books I read intensely and which helped form my taste and imagination in that period. Alas, no stamps from the Collie barbershop book exchange!

Nostalgia posts on social media mourn video stores; I miss the local book exchange more. Tell me your memories of book exchanges?