Acequia Booksellers
A Used Bookstore on 4th Street in Albuquerque's North Valley

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

The founding and the name

Acequia Booksellers opened around 2004 at 4019 4th Street NW, in a stretch of the North Valley that had been transitioning from agricultural supply shops and old commercial storefronts into a corridor of small galleries, cafes, and independent businesses. The name itself is a declaration of place. An acequia is an irrigation ditch — the gravity-fed water channels that have sustained agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley since the Spanish colonial period and remain a defining feature of the North Valley landscape. Naming a bookstore after the acequias was a way of saying that this shop belonged to this neighborhood, to this particular stretch of Albuquerque where the water still runs through earthen ditches alongside the roads.

The store was small, as used bookstores tend to be. It was not a warehouse operation or a bulk reseller. It was a curated shop — the kind of place where the owners chose what went on the shelves, and where the inventory reflected their own knowledge, taste, and reading lives. That curatorial sensibility is what made Acequia distinct from the general-interest used bookstores that sell whatever comes through the door.

The 4th Street corridor and the North Valley context

To understand Acequia Booksellers, you need to understand where it sat. North 4th Street in Albuquerque runs through the heart of the North Valley — one of the oldest continuously settled areas in the city, with roots in the Spanish colonial land grants of the eighteenth century. The families who established the settlements of Los Duranes, Los Candelarias, and Los Griegos in the 1750s built along the acequias that fed their fields, and the commercial corridor that eventually grew along 4th Street served those agricultural communities for generations.

By the time Acequia Booksellers opened, the 4th Street corridor had undergone several economic transitions. The agricultural-supply businesses and locally oriented shops of the mid-twentieth century had largely given way. In their place, a new generation of small independent operations was filling the old storefronts — art studios, specialty food shops, vintage stores, and the kind of one-owner businesses that thrive when commercial rents are moderate and foot traffic is local rather than tourist-driven. A bookstore fit naturally into that ecosystem. The North Valley had the right density of educated, arts-oriented residents to support a curated used bookshop, and the 4th Street corridor had the right kind of commercial space — affordable, characterful, and embedded in a neighborhood rather than isolated in a shopping center.

This corridor context matters for understanding the store's customer base. North Valley residents who shopped at Acequia were often the same people who supported the Bookworks events on Rio Grande Boulevard, who attended readings at the other independent bookstores around the city, and who built personal libraries that reflected serious engagement with literature, art, and the humanities. These are the libraries I encounter during estate work in the North Valley — deep, eclectic, and built over decades by readers who knew what they were looking for.

Gary Wilkie and Marilyn Stablein

Acequia was not run by casual booksellers. Gary Wilkie brought experience in the book trade and a background that included service on the board of West End Press, the Albuquerque-based publisher of politically progressive literature founded by John Crawford in 1975. West End Press published poets and writers including Meridel Le Sueur, Thomas McGrath, and Joseph Bruchac — the kind of serious literary output that a bookseller of Wilkie's orientation would know intimately. His educational background included studies at San Francisco State, placing him in the orbit of the Bay Area literary scene before he came to New Mexico.

Marilyn Stablein is an accomplished poet, essayist, fiction writer, and mixed-media book artist. Her book of poems Splitting Hard Ground won the New Mexico Book Award and the National Federation of Press Women's Book Award. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties Himalayan Memoir, Climate of Extremes: Landscape and Imagination, and Houseboat on the Ganges. Her work draws on years spent in India and Nepal, and her artistic practice includes sculptural book arts and altered books. She had been a book critic for the Seattle Times. A former NEA fellowship recipient, Stablein brought to the bookstore the perspective of a working writer who understood books not just as commercial objects but as made things — as artifacts of literary labor.

This combination of backgrounds — Wilkie's trade knowledge and small-press connections, Stablein's literary credentials and reviewing experience — shaped every shelf in the store. When a used bookstore is run by people who actually know the books, the inventory reflects that knowledge. Customers noticed. The people who found Acequia tended to come back.

What the shelves held

Acequia Booksellers specialized in used, out-of-print, and rare books across a range of subjects that reflected the owners' own intellectual landscape. The core areas of depth included:

• Literature and poetry. This was the backbone of the inventory. Contemporary fiction, classic literature, and an unusually deep poetry section that reflected Stablein's own practice and Wilkie's small-press connections. Chapbooks, small-press editions, and the kind of poetry volumes that general used bookstores rarely carry.
• Arts and humanities. Art criticism, art history, music, dance, drama, architecture — the interdisciplinary range of a shop run by people who considered the arts a continuous conversation rather than separate departments.
• Southwest history and Western Americana. The regional material that anchors any serious Albuquerque bookshop — New Mexico small-press titles, Southwest history, and the Western Americana that collectors and scholars look for. This section would have overlapped with the holdings of the larger stores like Page One, but at Acequia the selection was more personal, more curated.
• Native American studies, anthropology, and archaeology. Including a notable selection of Mayan and Mesoamerican studies — a specialty that distinguished the store from most general used bookshops in Albuquerque.
• Eastern and Western religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. Reflecting, in part, Stablein's own years in India and Nepal and her engagement with Buddhist and Hindu thought.
• Science and mathematics. A smaller section, but present — the mark of booksellers who didn't consider the humanities and sciences to be separate worlds.

The total inventory was substantial. When the store closed, roughly half the stock — an estimated fifteen thousand volumes — was transferred to Portland for the successor operation. That implies an Albuquerque inventory in the range of thirty thousand books, which is a serious collection for a curated used bookshop. These were not bulk-purchased remainders. Each book represented a selection decision by owners who knew what they were handling.

Community role in the North Valley

A used bookstore in a neighborhood like the North Valley serves a different community function than a new-book shop in a commercial district. Acequia was a gathering point for readers who preferred the quiet, browsable atmosphere of a secondhand shop — the kind of place where you walk in looking for one thing and leave with three books you did not know existed. The store hosted events and readings, connecting North Valley literary culture with the broader Albuquerque writing community.

Stablein's own literary reputation drew visitors who might not otherwise have found their way to a used bookshop on 4th Street. When a bookstore is owned by a published, award-winning writer, it attracts a certain caliber of customer and a certain quality of conversation. The store became part of the informal literary infrastructure that connects Albuquerque's independent bookstores, reading series, university programs, and writers' communities — the same network that included Living Batch in its era and continues through Bookworks today.

For the North Valley specifically, Acequia contributed to the neighborhood's identity as a place where independent, owner-operated businesses could sustain themselves by serving a local clientele rather than chasing tourist traffic or competing on price with online retailers. That identity has always been part of the North Valley's appeal, and the bookstore was one of its more visible expressions.

The Portland relocation

On January 18, 2014, after approximately ten years of operation in Albuquerque, Acequia Booksellers closed its doors at 4019 4th Street NW. Wilkie and Stablein relocated to Portland, Oregon, where they reopened under the name Anthology Booksellers. The move was a considered decision — a relocation rather than a forced closure. The owners took roughly half their inventory with them, shipping an estimated fifteen thousand books to Portland, where they set up a by-appointment and online operation.

The successor store, Anthology Booksellers, maintains many of the same specialties — literature, arts, humanities, and the eclectic scholarly material that defined the Acequia shelves. The website still uses the acequiabooksellers.com domain, a thread connecting the Portland operation to its Albuquerque origins. The inventory has grown to over twenty thousand titles, and the store operates online through major book-selling platforms as well as its own site.

For Albuquerque, the closure was another entry in the long list of independent bookstores that the city has lost. The North Valley lost a cultural anchor. The 4th Street corridor lost one of its more distinctive tenants. And the books that Acequia did not take to Portland — the other half of the inventory — dispersed into the Albuquerque market, where they now surface in estate libraries, thrift stores, and the hands of other used-book dealers.

How Acequia books appear in estate libraries

In my estate cleanout work across Albuquerque, I encounter books with Acequia Booksellers provenance regularly — particularly in North Valley households and in the libraries of readers who were active in Albuquerque's literary community during the 2004 to 2014 period. These books have certain recognizable characteristics:

• Penciled pricing. Used bookstores in the antiquarian tradition often price in pencil on the rear endpaper or inside the rear cover. Acequia-sourced books frequently carry penciled price marks consistent with secondhand-trade conventions.
• Inventory stickers or stamps. Some Acequia books carry small identifying marks — stickers or stamps — that link the book to the store. These are worth preserving as provenance documentation.
• Subject-matter signatures. A book with depth in Mesoamerican archaeology, Himalayan religion, or New Mexico small-press poetry that shows up in a North Valley estate library has a meaningful probability of being an Acequia purchase. The store's unusual subject specialties create a recognizable fingerprint.
• Author signatures from readings. Books signed by visiting authors at Acequia events carry a provenance connection to the store and to Albuquerque's literary-event calendar of that decade. These signatures, especially when dated, are part of the closed signature pool that gives Albuquerque-provenance books their documentary value.

The particular value of an Acequia-provenance book depends on the book itself. A signed first edition of a notable author, purchased at Acequia and signed at a store event, carries a documentable provenance chain that matters to collectors. A common trade paperback with a penciled price mark is part of the book's history but does not affect its resale value. What the provenance tells you in either case is that the book passed through the hands of knowledgeable booksellers and was chosen — not remaindered, not dumped — for the shelves of a curated shop.

The authentication angle

For anyone doing book authentication or provenance research on volumes from Albuquerque households, Acequia Booksellers is a useful reference point. The store operated during a specific window — approximately 2004 through early 2014 — at a specific address, with specific subject specialties. A book that fits the store's known inventory profile and shows up in a household within the store's geographic and temporal range has a plausible Acequia provenance even without a physical store mark. That kind of circumstantial provenance is part of how I build the story of a book's life in Albuquerque's used-book ecosystem.

Acequia's owners were themselves participants in the literary and book-arts community — not just sellers. Stablein's own books, and the books published by presses in her and Wilkie's professional networks, circulated through the store and into Albuquerque libraries. When I find a West End Press title or a small-press poetry collection in a North Valley estate, I consider whether the book's path led through Acequia. More often than one might expect, it did.

Why this page exists

Acequia Booksellers was a small store with a relatively short life — ten years in a city where some bookstores lasted three or four decades. But it was run by serious people who understood books deeply, and it served a neighborhood and a community that valued what it offered. Documenting the store is part of my broader project of recording Albuquerque's bookstore history — not because every small bookshop was a landmark, but because collectively they formed the infrastructure through which books reached readers and built libraries in this city.

When that infrastructure disappears — when the last used bookstore on a corridor closes, when the last owner-bookseller with deep subject knowledge retires or relocates — the loss is cultural, not just commercial. The books continue to circulate, but the knowledge and curatorial judgment that organized them is gone. This page is a small act of preservation: a record that Acequia Booksellers existed, that it mattered, and that its books are still out there in Albuquerque, waiting to be recognized for what they are.