BEST USED BOOKSTORE

Designed like a shoe store, the Barn features unvarnished wood shelves lining every available inch of wall space, stocked end-to-end with more books than some libraries. Simple ceiling-high shelves also divide the store into aisles for Detective (purchase: the unintentionally funny The Corpse Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan), Novels (purchase: two brand-new reprints of The Catcher in the Rye), Science Fiction (purchase: a short-story collection by overlooked genius Alfred Bester called Starburst), Gothic, Children, Biography, Education, Historical Romance, and many others, including the unusual Math Crafts section. There's other stuff: wishing stones, page marks, bookbags. You trade even -- say three of your books for three of theirs -- then pay a 25 percent charge on the value of the barter. A couple decades old and blessed with young, smart, polite clerks, the Barn doesn't need computers or any of that newfangled junk. Just an adding machine and a kazillion words published in book form, then offered to the world.