Henderson Books in Bellingham is the best used bookstore I’ve ever encountered, full stop. The volume and selection are unmatched. I’ve never made it through the fiction stacks in a single visit. On my last trip, I lingered far too long among the largest collection of Fay Weldon books I’ve ever seen, and it’s one of the only places I’ve been able to slowly piece together the hilariously philosophical Grooks volumes by Danish poet Piet Hein. A friend in the Bay Area once flew up to Bellingham on a pilgrimage, only to find the store closed for vacation—possibly for the first time in a decade.
But if you were to linger after hours and overhear a conversation between the owners, you’d likely see Robert, who founded the store, looking around at the towering shelves and saying something he’s apparently been saying for decades. “Let’s just quit.”
His wife Barbara—his partner in the store and in life—answers the way she always has. “No quitting.”
It sounds like a joke, but it’s also the operating philosophy behind one of the most remarkable used bookstores in the Pacific Northwest: a labyrinth of some 350,000 used books, stacked floor to ceiling in narrow aisles that feel both carefully negotiated and slightly contested.
“He wanted the aisles narrower,” she once said. “I wanted them wider. I got my way, mostly.”
Their partnership is written directly into the store.
Before Henderson Books existed, Robert lived something closer to a wandering reader’s life. In the 1950s and ’60s he drifted around the country, sometimes riding freight trains, rarely staying anywhere long. He never finished school, but he read constantly, buying books at garage sales because they were the only thing he could afford.
One day he sold a book back to a store and was startled by how much they paid him. The realization stuck: you could make a life out of books.
For years he followed a pattern: working for a while, saving money, quitting, reading, and occasionally opening small used bookstores that would last until a landlord or neighborhood change pushed him somewhere else. Bellingham was not supposed to be permanent. When he arrived in the mid-1980s, he brought what he called “the best fifty boxes” from a closing shop in Seattle and opened a small used bookstore downtown. Then a woman walked in. She was looking for a book.
They married around 1990. She kept her job at the post office for a time, but eventually joined him full time in the store. When Henderson Books moved into its current building in 1994, they built the shelves together with help from woodworking friends who practically lived in the space for months. The boards all still show their planer marks.
The design philosophy has remained simple: let the books create the atmosphere. There are no reading couches, no coffee bars, no decorative flourishes competing for attention.
Just books. A lot of them.
Running a used bookstore that size is not romantic work. Inventory arrives in unpredictable waves. Sections expand and contract. Entire walls slowly migrate outward as the collection grows. Through all of it, their roles have remained remarkably consistent. Robert brings the instinct of a lifelong reader. His rule is simple: never assume a book is valuable (or worthless) until you’ve looked closely.
His wife brings something else: steadiness. Over the years, whenever Robert has suggested closing the shop, she has answered the same way. “No quitting.”
Which is why Henderson Books still stands today, forty years after it began, less a business plan than a long-running conversation between two people who built a life, and an extraordinary store, out of the same stubborn promise, a promise, thankfully, still being kept.
Scott Lambridis is a novelist based in Bellingham, Washington. A former indie press founder, performance series organizer, olive farmer, and progressive rocker, he studied neurobiology at the University of Virginia, earned an MFA from San Francisco State University, and read a book from every country in the world. His debut novel, St. Ulphia’s Dead, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing on July 7, 2026. Learn more at scottlambridis.com
