Used books near Canby, Oregon: visit To Be Read in Milwaukie
Canby keeps a small-town pace that readers love, but a deep, browseable used bookstore — shelves of secondhand titles to lose yourself in — isn’t something every nearby town has. When the urge hits to dig through stacks, compare a few editions, and leave with more books than you planned, it’s worth pointing the car up the highway. The nearest one truly worth the drive is a straight run north, in Milwaukie.
To Be Read — up 99E to Milwaukie
To Be Read (formerly the Clackamas Book Exchange) has served Clackamas County readers for 45+ years from 7931 SE King Rd, Ste 1 in Milwaukie. Just so it’s clear: we’re not in Canby — we’re a real secondhand bookstore up the road in Milwaukie, and the drive is about as easy as it gets. From Canby, just follow 99E north through Oregon City and Gladstone, and you’ll roll into Milwaukie before long. It’s a familiar, mostly straight shot, and free parking is waiting when you arrive.
Worth the drive north
The reason to make the run is simple: the kind of shelf you can browse for an hour, at prices that let you say yes to one more. Here’s what you get:
- Thousands of used titles — fiction, classics, romantasy, mystery, sci-fi, kids’, and nonfiction — all at used-book prices, so a full bag stays affordable.
- Trade-in store credit for the books you’ve finished, so the shelves keep turning over and your next haul costs less.
- Genuine recommendations from staff who read widely and love matching a reader to the right book.
- Free parking, so the trip ends with browsing, not circling the block.
It helps to know what kind of stop this is. To Be Read isn’t a grab-and-go shop; it’s a browsing store, the sort of place where a quick visit quietly stretches into an hour because one good spine leads to the next. If shopping near Canby usually means new releases at full price, this is the trip that fills in the secondhand depth — older editions, out-of-print finds, and whole sections worth wandering.
Make the drive count
A run up 99E deserves a proper browse, so bring a box to trade and plan to stay a while rather than dashing in and out. Clear a shelf at home first; here’s how trade-in credit works so you arrive ready to swap your finished books for credit. Readers make the same kind of trip from across the area too — including Gresham and Tigard.
Check our hours and directions before you set out, see why readers across the metro make the drive, then browse the shop or line up picks with the Matchmaker so your stack is ready when you arrive.