Bookstores in Saint John

If you judge a town by its bookshops, Saint John, NB gives you 8 to judge by. That's 8 bookshops mapped around Saint John, each with its own shelves and specialties. The used sections are where the real bargains hide. Staff picks shelves are the fastest way to read a shop's personality.

This guide covers every bookstore we could verify in and around Saint John (within about 40 km), built from OpenStreetMap's community-maintained data. Names you'll run into include Dave Shoots Books and Heroes' Beacon Comics & Games, plus UNB Inprint. If a bookshop's missing from Saint John's list, it probably just hasn't been mapped yet.

The Saint John bookstore lineup

8 mapped within about 40 km:

What the map tells us about bookstores in Saint John

2 of the 8 list their opening hours on the map, which is genuinely useful — bookshops keep civilised hours, so the listed ones are usually reliable.

The Saint John bookstore crawl

The efficient Saint John bookstore crawl strings these together: Dave Shoots Books, Heroes' Beacon Comics & Games, UNB Inprint on 16 King Street, Indigo's, Coles, Anglican House, Catholic Bookstore on 48 Waterloo Street, and Scheherazade Books and Music — 8 stops, one logical order.

Bookstore tips for Saint John

Browsing in Saint John? A little strategy helps:

• Ask about the book club discount at Dave Shoots Books. Many shops discount book-club orders. If your club buys local, everyone wins.
• Look for local history at Heroes' Beacon Comics & Games. The local-interest shelf tells you what a town thinks of itself. Great for visitors, better for new residents.
• Check the staff picks shelf first. It's the fastest read of a shop's personality. If the picks excite you, the rest of the store will too.
• Don't overlook the classics wall. Every shop has one. Cheap editions of the books everyone claims to have read — your chance to actually read them.

Good to know

We searched about 40 km around Saint John — that covers the town itself plus the surrounding communities you'd reasonably drive to. Listings come from OpenStreetMap, mapped by local volunteers, so a brand-new bookstore in Saint John can take a while to appear. If you spot one of the 8 that's closed, or a great bookstore we missed, the fix is to update the map itself — that's where this guide reads from.

We don't list prices — they change constantly and vary by edition. What we list is the where: real shops, verified by real mappers, in alphabetical order with no favourites.

If you run one of the 8 listed here and something's wrong — a closure, a move, new hours — the fix is the same: update the shop on OpenStreetMap and the correction flows through to this page on the next daily refresh.