Used books near Tigard, Oregon: visit To Be Read in Milwaukie

Tigard sits in a busy, well-served corner of the metro, but a genuinely deep used bookstore — rows of secondhand titles you can browse for an hour — is rarer than you’d think. Plenty of places will sell you this week’s bestseller at full price; far fewer let you wander, dig, and turn up a forgotten favorite or a cheap copy of the classic you keep meaning to read. The nearest one worth the trip is a short hop east, in Milwaukie.

To Be Read — a short hop across the metro

To Be Read (formerly the Clackamas Book Exchange) has served readers for 45+ years from 7931 SE King Rd, Ste 1 in Milwaukie. To set expectations: we’re not in Tigard — we’re an honest-to-goodness secondhand bookstore in Milwaukie, and easy to reach. From Tigard the natural route is Highway 217 down to 99W, then over toward Milwaukie; many drivers find it simplest to cut across on 99E once they’re past the river. It’s a short cross-town trip rather than a haul, and there’s free parking when you land.

Why make the hop

The point of crossing town is the kind of shelf you can’t get from an app. Here’s what’s waiting:

• Thousands of used titles — fiction, classics, romantasy, mystery, sci-fi, kids’, and nonfiction — all at used-book prices, so you can fill a bag without flinching.
• Trade-in store credit for the books you’ve finished, so your shelves keep moving and your next stack costs less.
• Genuine recommendations from staff who actually read and love a good match.
• Free parking, so the only browsing you do is for books.

It helps to picture the visit before you go. To Be Read isn’t a grab-and-go shop; it’s a browsing store, the kind of place where a quick stop turns into an hour because one interesting spine leads straight to the next. If the bookstores near you in Tigard lean toward new releases and not much else, this is the trip that fills in the secondhand depth — older editions, out-of-print finds, long-running series, and whole sections worth getting lost in for an afternoon.

Plan the trip

Since you’re crossing the metro, make the visit count: bring a box to trade and give yourself time to wander the shelves rather than rushing a single aisle. Here’s how trade-in credit works so you arrive ready to swap your finished books for store credit. And you’re far from the only one making the trip — readers come our way from Gresham and Canby as well.

Check our hours and directions first, see why readers across the metro make the drive, then browse the shop or line up picks with the Matchmaker before you head over.