Second Chances Used Books is a cozy haven for books and those who love them, located in downtown Sebastopol, California.
The news for January 2026: we will not be scheduling customer book buys yet. We’ll resume taking appointments in February, so you can call February 1st for a chance to get on the calendar. We don’t have enough of a budget to schedule more than a dozen appointments, and we receive four times as many calls. My apologies to those people who do their best to get through and still miss the deadline.
I opened up shop in December 2017 in the three-bookstore town of Sebastopol, CA, 17 years after earning my bookseller’s stripes from the much-loved and much-mourned Aardvark Books. For 12 years, I managed Copperfield’s Used Books in Sebastopol and then co-owned Mockingbird Books for a couple more. When Mockingbird’s current owners moved to a different city and the space opened up, I realized it was now or never - be sensible, or go it alone?
I was a Virginia Woolf buff in my twenties. It was inevitable I’d choose a room of my own.
6932 Sebastopol Avenue, Ste E (located alongside the downtown plaza)
Sebastopol, CA 95472 ph: (707)-827-8291
Hours: 10:30 am to 5:00 pm every day
Closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day
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My name is Brandy, and I've been a bookseller and book buyer for 40 years and a reader for as long as I can remember. Second Chances is a modest one-woman tribute to a lifelong passion for reading, writing, and the multifarious pleasures of the printed word. While the store is small, my interests are many, and I keep the shelves filled with the popular and the peculiar, the beautiful and the thoughtful - in short, the best books I can find.
Left, with my sister at the height of my Virginia Woolf period. Don’t worry, my taste in books is better than my taste in clothes.
Right, three months before opening Second Chances, with Peter Capaldi aka the Twelfth Doctor, because how cool is that?
