Best Bookstores is an exhaustive guide to bookshops in California and the West, with an eye for the surprising and offbeat. Based on Alta’s popular print and web series, this updated, stand-alone volume is packed with recommendations from the magazine’s editors, contributors, and readers. It’s all here. Alta’s favorite comic shop in San Francisco. A far-out sci-fi seller in the Mojave Desert. A labyrinthine store in a former bank in downtown Los Angeles. Seattle’s best antiestablishment bookseller. And more.

PRAISE FOR BEST BOOKSTORES

“At long last, a guide to paradise for West Coast booklovers. With these wonderful, beautiful pages in your hands, you can wander the highways and wander the stacks, discovering great reads and meeting passionate booksellers from Seattle to San Diego.”
—Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls and The Barbarian Nurseries

“Alta’s guide is so beautifully assembled, so comprehensive, and full of narrative about bookstores, their locations, and their own stories that I can’t wait to recommend this to everyone. I love the features and maps as well—California is an entire universe, and here are our literary worlds.”
—Susan Straight, author of Mecca and The Country of Women

“Whenever I travel I gravitate to bookstores in the same way I seek out old friends. This portable and beautifully illustrated treasure showcases many of my favorites but also describes more havens that I shall seek out on the next trip!”
—Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone