Powell's Books
Based on Wikipedia: Powell's Books
A City Made of Books
Imagine a bookstore so large it occupies an entire city block. Not a warehouse. Not a distribution center. A bookstore you can walk through, where the aisles twist and turn through nine color-coded rooms, where you might enter looking for a novel and emerge hours later clutching a used book on medieval siege warfare you didn't know you needed. This is Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon, and it claims to be the largest independent bookstore in the world.
That claim is worth pausing on. The store sprawls across more than 68,000 square feet—roughly one and a half acres of retail floor space dedicated entirely to books. The inventory exceeds four million volumes: new titles mixed with used, rare finds shelved alongside out-of-print treasures. On any given day, the store buys around 3,000 used books from people walking through its doors.
But Powell's isn't just architecturally impressive. Its story is a fifty-year meditation on what it means to sell books in America—through the rise of chain bookstores, the advent of Amazon, the arrival of e-books, labor disputes, and a global pandemic that nearly destroyed it.
A Father and Son Partnership
The bookstore's origin story involves two Powells and two cities. In 1970, Michael Powell opened a bookstore in Chicago specializing in used, rare, and discounted books, with a particular focus on academic and scholarly works. The next year, 1971, his father Walter Powell founded a separate bookstore in Portland.
Then came a twist. In 1979, Walter's landlord declined to renew his lease. Michael joined his father in Portland, and within a year they found the location that would become the City of Books. Michael bought the business from his father in 1982, and the expansion began.
The first branch store opened in 1984 in a suburban shopping center. Michael Powell had a theory: the "edgy" neighborhood around the flagship store was limiting his customer base. So the new location was deliberately different. White shelving. Tile floors. Banners over the aisles. Four times the size of a typical chain bookstore, but with a polish that said "approachable."
A travel bookstore followed in 1985, located on Pioneer Courthouse Square—one of Portland's most prominent public spaces. Then more stores, roughly one per year through the late 1980s.
The Independent Bookstore Renaissance
By the early 1990s, Powell's had become part of something larger: a resurgence of independent bookstores across the country. At their peak, independent bookstores collectively captured 32 percent of all book sales in the United States.
This might seem unremarkable now, but consider the context. The 1990s saw the explosive growth of chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders. These chains offered deep discounts, comfortable seating, and in-store coffee shops. They were supposed to kill independent booksellers.
Yet Powell's thrived by offering something chains couldn't: scale combined with character. The maze-like City of Books felt like an adventure. The mix of new and used books meant discoveries were possible—you could find a pristine first edition next to a dog-eared paperback. Staff picks weren't corporate mandates but genuine recommendations from people who read voraciously.
The Internet Before Amazon
Here's a detail that surprises most people: Powell's established its website in 1994. Amazon.com launched in 1995.
Let that sink in. A brick-and-mortar bookstore in Portland, Oregon beat what would become the world's largest online retailer to the internet by a full year.
Powell's had actually started even earlier, in 1993, with email and FTP-based access to its technical bookstore inventory. FTP—File Transfer Protocol—was how people transferred files before the web existed. It was clunky, text-based, and required technical knowledge. But it worked. If you knew what you were doing, you could browse Powell's technical book collection from anywhere in the world.
The traditional e-commerce site that followed in 1994 eventually expanded beyond technical books to include fiction and every other genre. This online presence has contributed substantially to Powell's survival and growth over the decades since.
The Pillar of Books
In 1999, the City of Books expanded to its current size. The expansion included a new entrance facing the Pearl District—a neighborhood that was transforming from industrial warehouses into one of Portland's trendiest areas.
At this entrance stands the Pillar of Books: a carving in Tenino sandstone depicting a stack of eight of the world's great books. Tenino sandstone comes from quarries in Washington State and has been used in buildings throughout the Pacific Northwest since the late 1800s. It's a material that feels both permanent and regional.
The pillar's base carries an inscription in Latin that translates to: "Buy the book, read the book, enjoy the book, sell the book." This isn't just a motto—it's a description of Powell's entire business model. The cycle of books flowing in and out is what makes the store work. You buy a new book, you read it, you bring it back and sell it for store credit, then you buy more books. The same physical object might pass through a dozen readers over the course of its life.
For the year ending June 2000, Powell's revenue hit 41.8 million dollars.
Recognition and Expansion Plans
In 2002, USA Today named Powell's one of America's ten best bookstores. In 2016, CNN called it one of the "coolest" bookstores in the world.
In January 2008, Powell's announced ambitious expansion plans: adding up to two floors to the southeast corner of the downtown City of Books, which would mean at least 10,000 additional square feet of retail space. Plans submitted to the Portland Design Commission in November of that year included a rooftop garden atop the new addition and an "art cube" over a redesigned main entrance.
Whether those specific plans materialized is less important than what they represented: even in 2008, as Amazon was beginning its dominance of book retail and the Kindle had just launched, Powell's was still thinking about physical expansion. The belief in brick-and-mortar bookselling ran deep.
Three Generations of Powells
In March 2010, Michael Powell confirmed he would hand over management of the business to his daughter Emily. The transition happened that July, making Powell's a three-generation family business: Walter founded it, Michael built it into an empire, and Emily would navigate the challenges of the 2010s and beyond.
That same month brought the first signs of those challenges. Powell's announced it would close its technical bookstore on the North Park Blocks. The sections on math, science, computing, engineering, construction, and transportation would consolidate into a location near the main City of Books. The reason? A five-year decline in brick-and-mortar sales of technical books as customers increasingly bought online.
This pattern—specialty stores closing as their subjects migrated online—would repeat. The travel bookstore at Pioneer Courthouse Square had already closed in 2005. The home and garden specialty store would close in 2020.
The Google Partnership and Print on Demand
In December 2010, Google announced its eBooks service, and Powell's was revealed as a charter member. This was significant: Google eBooks was an attempt to create an alternative to Amazon's Kindle ecosystem, and Powell's was positioned as one of the independent voices in that effort.
The following June, Powell's participated in Google Offers during that service's first month. According to TechCrunch, which described Powell's as "a Portland institution," 5,000 Powell's vouchers sold out within hours, making it the most popular deal in Google Offers' first month of operation.
In May 2012, Powell's began offering print-on-demand books through the Espresso Book Machine. This device, about the size of a small office copier, can print, bind, and trim a paperback book in a few minutes. The technology represents an interesting middle ground between traditional bookstores and digital publishing: you can walk into Powell's, order an out-of-print book, and walk out with a fresh physical copy.
Celebrity Books and Warehouse Sales
In October 2010, Powell's announced a notable acquisition: 7,000 books from the library of Anne Rice, the author of Interview with the Vampire and numerous other novels. These weren't just any copies of books—they were association copies, meaning books that had belonged to Rice personally. Some might contain her annotations, her bookmarks, her marginalia. Powell's offered these on their website, giving collectors worldwide access to pieces of a famous author's personal library.
More recently, in 2024, Powell's held its first-ever used book sale out of its Northwest Portland warehouse. The event drew over 10,000 attendees, with some people reporting wait times of four or five hours just to get inside. A second annual sale followed in July 2025. These warehouse sales represent a different model: instead of the curated, browsable experience of the retail stores, they're treasure hunts through massive quantities of unsorted inventory at lower prices.
The Labor Question
Powell's has a complicated labor history that reveals tensions inherent in any large, values-driven business.
In 1991, following some post-holiday layoffs, employees formed an organizing committee seeking to join the Oregon Public Employees Union. They got more than 35 percent of workers to sign union cards, but because fewer than 65 percent had signed—the union's suggested threshold for filing for an election—they decided not to proceed. Powell's responded to the organizing effort by updating and expanding its employee handbook in April 1992, addressing grievance procedures, probation and termination processes, and employee assistance programs.
The union effort returned in September 1998, sparked by an email from management announcing reductions in wage increases. Twenty-six employees formed a new organizing committee, this time choosing the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, known as the ILWU. The ILWU had a specific appeal: employees could charter their own self-governing local union covering about 350 workers across all stores and departments.
By March 1999, they filed for a union certification election with the National Labor Relations Board. A month later, by a vote of 161 to 155—a margin of just six votes—ILWU Local 5 became official.
A Contentious First Contract
In September 1999, the newly formed union met with Powell's management to begin contract negotiations. After early successes, 2000 brought a slowdown in discussions, followed by an escalating series of events: rallies, filings of unfair labor practices, an unsuccessful attempt to decertify the union, a one-day shutdown of the shipping department accompanied by the slashing of a van's tire, and eventually federal mediation.
A three-year contract was finally announced in August 2000.
The relationship between Powell's and its union has remained complicated. In February 2011, Powell's announced layoffs of 31 employees, more than 7 percent of its unionized workforce. Management cited "the unprecedented, rapidly changing nature of the book industry." A union representative noted that Powell's had already reduced its workforce by about 40 through attrition in the prior year but felt layoffs were still necessary due to declining sales of new books and rising health care costs.
The Pandemic Crisis
In mid-March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began shutting down businesses across America, Powell's announced it was closing all five of its locations and terminating nearly all employees.
CEO Emily Powell's letter on March 17, 2020 did not provide the precise number of layoffs, but roughly 85 percent of the 400 members of the company's unionized workforce were terminated. The union noted that only 49 of more than 100 former employees were union-represented, while the remaining managers were now performing front-line duties typically handled by represented employees—a response to what Powell's described as a large surge in online orders.
The Portland International Airport store and kiosk never reopened; Powell's announced their permanent closure in July 2020.
The Slow Rebuild
As Powell's gradually began rehiring staff in April 2021, a dispute arose that illuminated the strange new employment landscape of the pandemic era. Former employees were required to apply for open positions as new employees. Powell's claimed that workers' rights to return to their old jobs had expired, and no agreement had been reached with the union to extend those rights or maintain previous pay levels.
The majority of hired staff have been previous employees, but they returned with reset seniority and potentially different pay. The pandemic had, in effect, allowed Powell's to restructure its workforce in ways that would have been far more contentious under normal circumstances.
Tensions continued. On Labor Day—September 4, 2023—Powell's employees went on strike, and the store closed for the day.
What Powell's Means
Powell's won the Best Bookstore category in Willamette Week's annual "Best of Portland" readers' poll in 2025. This recognition from a local alternative weekly newspaper matters because it reflects what Powell's represents to Portland itself: not just a business, but an institution, a landmark, a piece of civic identity.
The store's survival against Amazon and chain bookstores, through the e-book revolution, through a pandemic that nearly killed it, through labor disputes that continue to this day—all of this has made Powell's into something more than a place to buy books. It's become a symbol of what independent retail can be: large enough to compete on selection and price, small enough to maintain character and community connection.
Walking through the color-coded rooms of the City of Books, you're moving through decades of accumulated decisions about what matters in a bookstore. The used books mixed with new. The staff recommendations. The continuation of a business model that says books should be bought, read, enjoyed, and sold again. The physical presence taking up an entire city block in an age when bookstores are supposed to be dying.
Powell's isn't just selling books. It's arguing that bookstores still matter—and after more than fifty years, it's still making the case.