Bell’s offers a delightful and eclectic combination of new, used, and rare books. While you might find scarce seventeenth-century herbals with botanical woodcuts, 18th and 19th-century medical treatises bound in sheepskin, signed limited editions by Joseph Conrad, Jack London, or Wallace Stegner; and gilt-edged, Moroccan leather-bound sets of the works of Charles Dickens, you could also find a number of great children’s classics.

Known for our large holdings in literature and history, Bell’s also stocks a vast array of gardening, art and architecture, cookbooks, vintage technical books, new children’s books, military science, transportation, religion, natural history, and much, much more.

By far the largest part of the collection, over 150,000 volumes available for browsing, is simply good quality secondhand hardcover or trade paperback books in 500 subject categories. The challenge and the joy have been in changing our inventory to reflect the interests and needs of the surrounding community.

We frequently have customers bring their grandchildren to see where three generations of their family have bought books. Although our regulars have included Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, Newbery Award recipients, bishops, movie stars, senators, international statesmen, and leaders of Silicon Valley industry, the generations of book-loving people of Palo Alto who have walked through our doors day in and day out for eighty-five years, keeping up our spirits and sharing our enthusiasms, are the ones who have made it possible for the Bell family to keep doing what we love most every day, and for that we are profoundly grateful.

Recent seismically proportioned shifts in the world of bookselling have raised questions about the relevance of brick-and-mortar bookstores in the environment of Silicon Valley, but, if you, like us, enjoy real books in the real world, holding volumes that feel good, smell good, and are a pleasure to the eye and the hand, then join us joyfully in the knowledge that at Bell’s, you can be physically surrounded by the works of the best minds of all time.

In 1935, Herbert Bell, age 24, drove north from Los Angeles with a station wagon full of books, to start The College Book Company with his employer, David Lawyer, a Los Angeles book dealer. They hoped to sell textbooks, as Stanford did not have its own bookstore at the time. The original location was 104 University Avenue, adjacent to the sporting goods shop known as Smith’s on the circle. The idea was to attract the students who came in for bicycle rentals.

In 1936, David Lawyer determined there was no money to be made in selling books to students, and sold out for $2300 to Herbert Bell who said later ” … so he sold it for a song, and I bought it for a song, and I went singing my way into poverty, and lived on hamburgers for some time.”

By 1938 it was called the College Book Shop and had relocated for the first time to 536 Emerson. When the landlord raised the rent, 1944 brought another move (to 408 University) where we participated in book drives for the troops in W.W.II.

In 1948 we moved to 229 Hamilton (The Cardinal Hotel building) where the high ceilings allowed for our signature look; soaring shelves with tall ladders. Finally 536 Emerson Street came up for sale in 1950, and the Bells purchased it. The building, with egg and dart molding on a dark green marble base outside, and pressed tin ceilings and a period staircase and balcony inside, was built in 1924, and designated a Category #2 on the Historic Register by the city of Palo Alto in 1988.

That final move was accomplished with the physical assistance of the head of the German Dept. at Stanford, employee Barbara Worl, and a local policeman who took pity on Bell’s when the landlord threatened legal action if they weren’t out by midnight. They all rolled carts of books around the corner from Hamilton to Emerson late into the night.

That night’s labor put Barbara in the hospital with a back injury, but that didn’t keep her down. Just out of Stanford with a degree in history when she started at Bell’s, she stayed on for 55 years. She was a noted rosarian, with two roses named after her, and an encyclopedic knowledge of books of horticulture. She gave lectures, had her own publishing house (Sweetbrier Press), and had her garden featured in international horticultural books and magazines. She got Bell’s involved annually for a decade with the San Francisco Landscape Garden Show… a fundraiser for Golden Gate Park. Barbara retired in 2006 to work full time in her garden. She died in her home in September of 2017, with her roses in full bloom.

By 1953 the name had altered to Bell’s College Book Shop, and by 1971- Bell’s Book Store. Today it is legally named Bell’s Books.