What it is
Changing Hands is the independent bookstore of the Valley, and has been for fifty years. It opened on April 1, 1974, in a former typewriter-repair shop at 9 East Fifth Street, a block off Mill Avenue, when three young people, Gayle Shanks, Bob Sommer and Tom Brodersen, scraped together about $500 to buy the stock of a Mill Avenue used-book dealer and added one case of new titles chosen from the Whole Earth Catalog. It moved to Mill in 1978, grew with the street, and in 1998 moved again, to a large space in a shopping center at McClintock Drive and Guadalupe Road in south Tempe, which is where you will find it.
The store is big and bright, with new and used books shelved together by subject, so that the novel you came for is usually there twice at two prices; a wide gift wing; a children’s room with its own staff; and a stage at the back where the events happen. The events are the thing that sets it apart. Changing Hands runs one of the strongest author calendars of any bookstore in the country, several evenings a week in season, from national tours to Arizona writers to storytimes, most of them free.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has two fine bookstores, and both are specialists: the Poisoned Pen for mysteries and signed first editions, Guidon Books for Western and Civil War history. Changing Hands is the general store, the one where you go without a title in mind and leave with three, and the used shelves make it the only bookstore within half an hour where a stack of paperbacks costs what a stack of paperbacks should. The author events are the other reason: a writer you have read, on a weeknight, in a room of a hundred people, for nothing, is a kind of evening Scottsdale does not offer.
The practical version
Twenty-five minutes from Old Town, no traffic: Scottsdale Road south into Rural Road, east on Guadalupe to McClintock. The store is in the strip center on the corner with a free lot, a coffee shop and a few restaurants. Open daily, with long hours; check the site for the buyback counter’s schedule if you are bringing books to trade. An hour browses it; an event night is three.
When to go
Event nights, which cluster from September through May when the publishers tour, are the reason to plan a trip; the calendar is online and a national name on a Tuesday is the best use of a Scottsdale evening south of the river. Weekday afternoons are the quiet browsing hours. Saturday mornings are storytime and the children’s room at full volume. Summer is the slow season, with the used shelves at their fullest because everyone in Tempe has cleaned out a bookcase in the heat.
What to do
Browse the mixed shelves. The used copies carry a sticker and sit beside the new, which makes Changing Hands one of the few stores where you choose the condition and price of the same book on the spot. The staff picks wall near the front is reliably good and local. The gift wing carries the cards, puzzles and Arizona things that make it the default present stop for south Tempe. The buyback counter takes your finished books for trade credit on posted hours. The cafe in the same center covers coffee before and the restaurants cover dinner after.
With kids
The children’s room is large, staffed by people who have read what they recommend, and runs storytimes and events for every age; the gift wing has the games. Our Scottsdale with kids note pairs the store with Kiwanis Park, ten minutes west, as a south Tempe afternoon.
The neighborhood
McClintock and Guadalupe is suburban south Tempe, a few minutes from the 101, with the kind of strip-center restaurants that make a reliable, unexciting dinner. The Arizona State campus and Mill Avenue are a ten-minute drive north if the evening wants a second act.
The story
In the spring of 1974, Mill Avenue was a half-empty college main street and a used-book dealer on it wanted out. Gayle Shanks, her husband Bob Sommer and their partner Tom Brodersen bought his stock for about $500, rented a former typewriter shop on Fifth Street, and opened on April Fools’ Day with used books, a single case of new ones chosen from the Whole Earth Catalog, and a name that meant what it said: books changing hands. The store moved onto Mill itself in 1978 and spent twenty years there as the street turned from hippie strip to college main street to the chain-store block it became in the 1990s.
That change pushed them out. In 1998 the owners took the store to a large space at McClintock and Guadalupe, in a suburban shopping center that had the parking and the square footage Mill no longer offered, and the move, which looked like a retreat, made the store. The room was big enough for a real events program, a real children’s section and a gift wing, and the neighborhood was full of the families and university people who buy books. The 2008 recession was survived without layoffs by cutting hours and persuading the landlord to lower the rent, a story the owners tell with some pride. In 2014 they opened a second store at The Newton, a converted restaurant on West Camelback Road in Phoenix, and put a bar in it, the First Draft Book Bar, which the Tempe store has never had and does not need. The two stores marked fifty years in 2024.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s book trade went the other way, toward specialty. The Poisoned Pen, founded in 1989, became the country’s mystery bookstore; Guidon has sold Western history since 1964. Changing Hands is the generalist the three of them orbit, and a good share of its event-night crowd drives down from Scottsdale, which is why its calendar appears in our shopping note as the one bookstore worth leaving the city for.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south from Old Town; it becomes Rural Road at the Tempe line. Continue to Guadalupe Road, turn east, and the center is at McClintock Drive on the southwest corner, with its own lot. About 25 minutes with no traffic. From North Scottsdale take the 101 to Guadalupe and go west a mile. It is a car trip; our getting around note has the rideshare math, which works for an event night if two of you are going.