About Us

The Second Story Used Books opened its doors in 1998 in Canmore, Alberta, a few minutes from the eastern entrance of Banff National Park. What began as a single shelf of traded paperbacks and a handful of local history titles has grown, over three decades, into one of the region’s most complete collections of used, out-of-print, and rare books.

We have always believed that a used bookstore is a kind of archive. Every copy that comes through our door carries a small piece of its own history, from the notes left in the margins to the bookplates pasted inside the cover and the inscriptions written on a birthday forty years ago. Our job is to find those books a second reader, and often a third and a fourth, long after their first printing has gone out of circulation.

We began selling online in 1998 as well, one of the earlier independent bookstores in Alberta to do so, which let us connect our shelves in Canmore to collectors, researchers, and casual readers far beyond the Bow Valley. That mix of a physical shop and a searchable catalogue is still how we work today.

Our store sits at 713 Main Street in Canmore, on the doorstep of Banff National Park, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. Main Street is a walkable strip of independent shops, cafes, and outfitters backed by the peaks of the Three Sisters and Ha Ling, which makes us a natural stop for hikers, climbers, and travellers passing through on their way into the park.

That setting shapes what we carry. Being surrounded by mountains has made us a genuine specialist in books on the Canadian Rockies: mountaineering history, trail and route guides, geology, wildlife, and the settlement history of Banff, Canmore, and the surrounding valleys. Visitors regularly tell us they found a title here they had searched for elsewhere without luck.

It also shapes the rhythm of the store. Summer brings travellers and climbers looking for something practical before a trip; winter brings local readers settling in for a long season, and a noticeably slower, more thorough kind of browsing.

Inside the store you will find more than 40,000 used books, organised across twenty categories from Animal Books and Anthropology through to Classics, Climbing, Cookbooks, and Economics. Alongside the used inventory we stock a curated selection of new titles, with particular depth in Canadian Rockies subject matter that is difficult to find through general retailers.

Our shelves mix everyday reading copies with genuinely scarce material: early Canadian editions, signed copies, small-press poetry, expedition accounts, community cookbooks, and regional histories that were printed in small runs and never reprinted.

Whether you are furnishing a reading list or chasing a single missing volume for a collection, our stock tends to reward a slow, careful browse rather than a quick look at one shelf.

Every book in the store has come to us through one of a few routes: estate collections, trade-ins from local readers, private libraries we are asked to appraise, and purchases from other dealers and book fairs across Western Canada.

We look closely at condition, edition, and completeness before anything goes on the shelf, and we price with an eye to both fairness to the seller and value for the buyer. A book that is incomplete, badly damaged, or misrepresented helps nobody, so a fair amount of what is offered to us politely goes back out the door.

Because so much of our stock arrives one collection at a time, our inventory is always shifting. A category that looks thin one month can fill out considerably the next, which is part of why regular customers make a habit of checking back.

Not every book we sell starts out on our own shelves. If you are looking for something specific that we do not currently list, our Offline Search Service lets you send us the details, author, title, edition, or whatever you remember, and we will search our own inventory along with other bookstores and book-search services on your behalf.

This service has become one of the quieter strengths of the store. Over the years we have tracked down long out-of-print regional histories, childhood favourites identified only by a cover colour and a half-remembered plot, factory manuals for vehicles no dealership can supply, and technical titles customers had been chasing for years.

Submitting a request commits you to nothing. We report back with condition and price, and you decide from there.

We charge only the actual cost of shipping, calculated at checkout, rather than a flat markup, and our default shipping estimate is deliberately conservative so the real charge is often lower than quoted.

We grade every used book honestly and describe condition plainly, because a used bookstore only works long-term if customers can trust the description before the book arrives. If you want more detail on a specific copy, or photographs of a higher-value title, we are glad to provide them.

Selling and buying used books is, in a small way, a form of conservation: every copy we resell is one that does not need to be printed again. We take that seriously, and it is part of why so many of our customers become repeat customers.

If you are travelling through Canmore on your way into Banff National Park, stop in and browse; the shelves reward unhurried visitors, and staff who have worked here for years can usually point you toward exactly the right shelf within a few minutes of hearing what you are after.

If you are further afield, our full catalogue is searchable online by author, title, description, and keyword, and we ship worldwide at actual cost.

For anything you cannot find listed, get in touch or send an Offline Search Service request, and we will do the legwork of tracking it down.