At any given time, half a million volumes are stored in warehouses awaiting shelf life. Six thousand people visit on an average day, half to browse or to sip an espresso in the Anne Hughes Coffee Room. Or that visitors tend to linger longest in the children's and science fiction sections. But we also discover shelves devoted to appliance repair and Arthurian legends, comics and cognitive science, etiquette and ethnobotany, paper dolls and power tools, voodoo and vaudeville. No, Marv Albert didn't author that last treatise.
Most major authors find their way here to autograph and read new books or to speak.
Or to shop. But only a real visit allows full appreciation both of Powell's, which is open 365 days a year, and of numerous other attractions in Portland, the City of Roses.