What it is
Changing Hands is the independent bookstore Arizona has had since 1974, when it opened as a used-book shop on Mill Avenue in Tempe, and its Phoenix store, opened on May 30, 2014, is where most of the Valley now goes to hear a writer read. The store takes up the west end of The Newton, a conversion of a longtime Camelback Road steakhouse into a bookstore, a restaurant and an event space, and it is a full general bookstore, new and used, with the sections you expect done well and a Southwest shelf done better than anywhere else. The thing that made it famous is in the middle of the floor: First Draft Book Bar, which pours beer and wine on tap and coffee from open to close, so that you read with a glass in hand and the store at 5 PM on a Thursday has the sound of a good bar.
The author events are the other reason. Changing Hands has, for decades, been the stop on the national book tour for Phoenix, and the Phoenix store’s room and stage made the calendar bigger: several evenings a week in high season, mostly free, with the big names selling out the folding chairs. If you have a favorite writer, check the schedule before you book the trip.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has one great bookstore and it is a specialist: the Poisoned Pen, in Old Town, one of the best mystery and crime bookshops anywhere, and Guidon Books for the Western and Civil War shelf. For everything else, a general bookstore with depth, a children’s section, a cookbook wall and a bar, this is the one, and it is twenty minutes straight down Camelback Road from the resorts.
The practical version
Twenty minutes from Old Town west on Camelback to 3rd Avenue, free parking at The Newton, light rail at Central and Camelback. Open daily until 9, until 8 on Sunday. The bar runs store hours with a weekday happy hour. Events are usually at 7; arrive by 6:30 for a seat. The restaurant in the same building is the dinner before or after.
When to go
A weekday late afternoon is the store at its best: quiet shelves, the happy hour, the event crowd arriving at 6:30 if there is one. Saturday morning is the children’s hour, with storytimes and strollers. Summer is when a bookstore with a bar makes the most sense in Phoenix, as the air-conditioned afternoon a visitor needs between the pool and dinner.
The event calendar peaks from October through April, when the touring authors come through for the weather like everyone else.
What to do here, in order
- The Southwest section. Arizona history, Native authors, desert natural history, the Phoenix and Scottsdale shelf; this is where the books that this site keeps citing live, and the staff recommendations are reliable.
- The bar. Order a glass of something local, or a coffee before noon, and carry it to the shelves. Nobody will mind.
- Used books, mixed in with new throughout the store rather than exiled to a back room; the fiction and cookbook used shelves are the ones to check.
- The children’s section, the best in the Valley, with its own event schedule.
- An event, if there is one; the schedule is on the site and the chairs go early.
Eating
The Newton’s restaurant shares the parking lot and the building, which makes a bookstore evening into a whole one. Lux Central, the coffeehouse and bar at Central and Campbell, is a mile south if you want the neighborhood’s other living room.
With kids
Storytimes, a big children’s section and a bar for the parent: this is the easiest bookstore in the Valley to spend an hour in with a child, and the light rail a block away is a bonus for the under-eights.
The story
Changing Hands opened in 1974 on Mill Avenue in Tempe, when Mill was a street of head shops and secondhand stores a block from Arizona State, as a used bookstore run by a few people who wanted to sell books to students. It grew with the street, added new books, and became over the next twenty-five years the independent bookstore of the Valley, the one that survived the chains in the 1990s by being better at the thing bookstores are for. When Mill Avenue gentrified past it, the store moved in 2000 to a shopping center on McClintock Drive in south Tempe, where it still is.
The Phoenix store was the gamble. A longtime Camelback Road steakhouse had closed, and the developers who took the building turned it into The Newton, a mixed project of bookstore, restaurant and event hall. Changing Hands opened its half on May 30, 2014, and put a bar in the middle of the floor, which in Arizona in 2014 was a novel idea and in the decade since has been copied in bookstores around the country. First Draft became a neighborhood bar in its own right, with regulars who do not buy books and book buyers who do not drink, and the store’s event stage made it the Phoenix stop for touring writers in a way the Tempe shop, for all its history, had never quite managed. The bar marked ten years in 2024.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s bookselling went the other way: specialist rather than general. The Poisoned Pen, opened in 1989, became one of the great crime-fiction bookstores in the world by selling signed first editions to collectors everywhere; Guidon Books did the same for the Western and Civil War shelf. Changing Hands sent its general-interest readers to those two for their specialties and took the rest, and the three stores have shared authors, customers and the occasional event for thirty years. A reader staying in Scottsdale does the Poisoned Pen on a weekday afternoon and this store on a weekday evening and has covered the Valley.
Getting there
From Old Town, Camelback Road west about seven miles, past the Biltmore and across Central Avenue, to 3rd Avenue; The Newton is on the north side of Camelback with its own lot. Twenty minutes with no traffic, more at the evening rush on Camelback. The Valley Metro light rail stops at Central and Camelback, a few hundred yards east, which makes the bookstore a stop on a car-free day with the Heard Museum and the Phoenix Art Museum down the line; our getting around note explains how to reach the train from Scottsdale.