Becker's Books

Becker's Books Houston's best secondhand bookstore since 1993. Open Thursday to Sunday, 11-6. Tolkien fans knows to be true, that "not all who wander are lost."

Tucked away in a sleepy neighborhood just outside the Loop on the West side, Becker's Books is one of Houston's largest bookstores by inventory, although you wouldn't know it when you pull up. After walking around however, you'll find what you didn't even know you were looking for. People often show up to the small, converted Houston house having cleared half an hour to look for one or two books.

Many leave several hours later, smiling in spite of themselves with an armful of books, giving credence to what any J.R.R.

05/01/2026

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran — Day 30 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

For our final day of 30 books in 30 days, I’m bringing you a special copy of one of my absolute favorite books, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Gibran was a Lebanese-American poet and painter who died in 1931 at forty-eight, with no idea this little book would go on to be read at JFK Jr.‘s wedding, given out by Elvis to friends, and translated into more than a hundred languages. It’s been continuously in print since 1923 and is one of the best-selling works of the twentieth century. This copy is the tenth printing from July 1966, still in its original Knopf slipcase — which is rarer than the book itself, since most slipcases got tossed or destroyed decades ago.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/30/2026

What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World by Reginald Bragonier Jr. and David Fisher — Day [ #] of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World by Reginald Bragonier Jr. and David Fisher, published by Hammond.
This book labels everything. Every part of a shoe, a helicopter, a human face, a church, a wine bottle — detailed illustrations with every single component named. The plastic tip of your shoelace is called an aglet. The little groove between your nose and upper lip is called the philtrum. This book calls itself “The Whatchamacallit Book” and that’s exactly what it is. Reference is one of the most overlooked sections in any used bookstore. People don’t browse it because they wouldn’t know what to look for, and they assume everything in a reference book is just as easily found on the internet. But you can’t Google something if you don’t know the word for it. That’s what books like this are for.



||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of Houston’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/29/2026

Buried Treasures by Maxfield Parrish — Day 28 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is Buried Treasures: The Black-and-White Work of Maxfield Parrish, 1896 to 1905. Maxfield Parrish was the most commercially reproduced American artist of the early twentieth century. At his peak in the 1920s, it was estimated that one in four American households had a Parrish print on the wall. Parrish belonged to the last generation of illustrators who were the primary visual medium for publishing and advertising before photography replaced them. He and his contemporaries, such as Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle and others, were doing the work that cameras would eventually take over. Parrish himself actually used photographs as references for his paintings, so he was competing with the technology and borrowing from it at the same time. He’s famous for his luminous color work, but this book collects his black-and-white illustrations from the first decade of his career, work that most people have never seen. This is a beautiful chronicle of some lesser-known work by an American icon.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/28/2026

Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez — Day 27 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez. Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Strange Pilgrims is a collection of twelve stories about Latin Americans living in Europe, and he worked on them for eighteen years. In the prologue he describes throwing finished versions away and rewriting them from scratch, over and over. García Márquez once said he prefers reading translations of his own work over the original Spanish. This particular book is translated by Edith Grossman, who also translated the most popular current version of Don Quixote. This is a first US edition. Mylar is the clear protective wrapping you see on a valuable book’s dust jacket. And when you see that, it means someone decided it was worth preserving.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/27/2026

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, Modern Library Edition — Day 26 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is The Turn of the Screw and The Lesson of the Master by Henry James, Modern Library edition. The Turn of the Screw is one of the most famous ghost stories ever written. A governess arrives at a country estate to care for two children and begins seeing the ghosts of two former employees. The central question — are the ghosts real or is the governess losing her mind? — has been debated by scholars for over a hundred years with no resolution. Henry James himself refused to say. This is a Modern Library edition. In 1925, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer bought the Modern Library from publisher Horace Liveright for two hundred thousand dollars. They used it as the foundation to build Random House, which became the largest English-language publisher in the world. The Modern Library was the seed. And for years, if you saw the torchbearer emblem, you knew it was a good book.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/26/2026

The Black Flame by Stanley G. Weinbaum — Day 24 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is The Black Flame by Stanley G. Weinbaum, published by Fantasy Press in 1948. Stanley G. Weinbaum published his first science fiction story, “A Martian Odyssey,” in 1934. It was one of the first stories to depict aliens as genuinely alien rather than just humans in costume, and it changed the genre overnight. Isaac Asimov called it a watershed moment for science fiction. Eighteen months later, Weinbaum was dead of lung cancer at thirty-three. His entire career lasted a year and a half. This novel was published posthumously in 1948 by Fantasy Press, a small specialty publisher in Reading, Pennsylvania that put out hardcover editions of stories that had previously only appeared in pulp magazines. This copy still has its original dust jacket with illustrations by A. J. Donnell.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/25/2026

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley — Day 24 of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Today’s book is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Bantam Classic edition. Frankenstein the monster is ubiquitous in our culture, but the backstory is possibly even more interesting. Mary Shelley was eighteen years old when she wrote this book. She was at a villa on Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori when Byron proposed they each write a ghost story. Hers is the only story that has survived, and it became the foundation of both science fiction and horror. She was also the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the founders of feminism, who died giving birth to her. This book is a Bantam Classic. Bantam launched its Classics line in 1958 to package canonical literature that was a little more highbrow with scholarly introductions for as little as thirty-five cents. In 1963, Bantam fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court and won, striking down government blacklists of books.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of ’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

04/24/2026

Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov — Day [ #] of 30 Books in 30 Days for the

We take one minute to share one unique used or rare book from our inventory every day, highlighting what it is and a few facts about why it’s interesting.

Isaac Asimov published nearly five hundred books across virtually every category of the Dewey Decimal System. He is best known for science fiction — Foundation, I Robot — but he also wrote guides to the Bible, Greek mythology, physics, history, and humor. This is his play-by-play companion to all of Shakespeare’s works, and it’s organized differently from most Shakespeare guides. Instead of grouping the plays as tragedies, comedies, and histories, Asimov organized them geographically — Greek, Roman, Italian, and English — and arranged them in chronological order of the events they depict, not when Shakespeare wrote them. He included maps, traced characters across multiple plays, and noted how much of each play is real history versus invention.


||| Who are we? |||

Becker’s Books is one of Houston’s most beloved independent bookstores, open since 1993. We carry nearly half a million books in-store and online, from affordable used reads to rare and collectible titles. www.beckersbooks.com

My name is Charlie Becker and I am a second-generation bookseller. I’m also lso developing an AI tool for identifying and cataloging used and rare books. I write about books, independent bookstores, and the future of small business.

Address

7405 Westview Drive
Houston, TX
77055

Opening Hours

Wednesday 11am - 6pm
Thursday 11am - 6pm
Friday 11am - 6pm
Saturday 11am - 6pm

Telephone

+17139578088

Website

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