The hook
California's biggest used bookstore fills an old downtown bank, and upstairs the shelves curl into tunnels and arches built entirely out of books.
01Why it's worth it
It started in 2005 as one man's operation out of a loft and grew into this: two floors of a 1914 bank building, marble columns and all, holding a quarter-million-plus books and records. The ground floor is a normal, if enormous, bookstore. Upstairs is where it turns into something else, a warren of little genre-nooks and artist studios threaded around sculptures made of books, a tunnel you walk through built of books, an arch of them, the old bank vault now full of the vintage and the strange. It has become Instagram-famous, which means crowds and a certain amount of people photographing rather than reading, but it earned the attention honestly, and there's a real bookstore underneath the spectacle.
02How to experience it
It's on Spring Street downtown, about six hours from the Bay. Free, open daily, busiest on weekends, so come on a weekday morning if you actually want to browse. The upstairs labyrinth is the reason to make the trip; give yourself time to get lost in it, then walk to the Bradbury a few blocks north.