Menaul Book Exchange
48 Years of Used Books on Menaul Boulevard

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

The founding: Eubank Paperback Book Exchange, 1975

Menaul Book Exchange did not start on Menaul Boulevard. It started in 1975 as the Eubank Paperback Book Exchange, opened by Juanita and Gerald McCoach in a small space on Eubank Boulevard, just north of Constitution, in the NE Heights of Albuquerque. The concept was straightforward and practical: buy used paperbacks from readers who had finished them, reshelve them at a fraction of the cover price, and sell them to the next reader. It was a trade-and-exchange model that had sustained used bookstores in American cities for decades, and the McCoaches brought it to a stretch of northeast Albuquerque that had no equivalent shop at the time.

The store served the surrounding residential neighborhoods — the post-war and mid-century housing developments east of the base that had filled in during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The customers were the people who lived in those neighborhoods. They read paperback mysteries, westerns, romance novels, science fiction, and the general trade fiction that mass-market publishers were producing in enormous quantities during that era. The McCoaches stocked what their customers wanted to read, and the exchange model kept the shelves turning over at a rate that made the store worth revisiting every couple of weeks.

The move to Menaul Boulevard

Within a few years of opening, the McCoaches relocated the store to 9409 Menaul Blvd NE, a converted building on one of Albuquerque's major east-west commercial corridors. With the move came the new name: Menaul Book Exchange. The Menaul Boulevard location was more visible, easier to reach from a wider catchment area, and offered more space than the original Eubank storefront. It was this location — in the commercial strip between Wyoming and Eubank on Menaul — where the store would spend the remaining four decades of its existence.

Menaul Boulevard in the NE Heights is a different environment from Central Avenue or Nob Hill. It is a commercial arterial lined with strip malls, auto shops, restaurants, and small retail businesses. The bookstore sat in this landscape as a neighborhood institution rather than a destination shop. People stopped in because they lived nearby, because they were running errands on Menaul, because they had been coming for years. The location was practical rather than atmospheric, and that practicality was part of the store's character. This was not a bookstore that cultivated a literary scene or hosted readings. It was a bookstore that sold used books to people who wanted to read them.

The broader landscape of Albuquerque bookstores during this period included shops of every description — literary independents, academic stores, rare-book dealers, and general-interest used shops. Menaul Book Exchange occupied its own lane within that ecosystem: the high-volume, genre-focused used paperback store that served everyday readers rather than collectors or academics.

The used-book business model

Understanding what Menaul Book Exchange was requires understanding the used-paperback-exchange model that sustained it. The economics were simple. Customers brought in bags and boxes of books they had finished reading. The store gave them credit toward future purchases, or bought the books outright for a modest amount. Those books went onto the shelves at prices well below retail. Customers came back, browsed, bought, and eventually brought those same books back in to start the cycle again.

This model rewards volume and turnover. A used-paperback exchange does not survive on high margins per book. It survives on moving thousands of books per month at modest per-unit prices, with the trade-in system keeping acquisition costs low. The store needs a steady inflow of used books from its community, and it needs enough foot traffic to move those books back out before the shelves become stagnant. For forty-eight years, Menaul Book Exchange maintained that balance — a testament both to the store's management and to the reading habits of the surrounding neighborhoods.

At its peak, the store held approximately 200,000 volumes. That is an enormous number for a used bookstore, and it speaks to the depth of the inventory. A customer looking for a specific romance author or a particular western series had a reasonable chance of finding it on the shelves. The breadth of the stock was one of the store's defining characteristics — it was not a small, curated shop. It was a warehouse of reading material, organized by genre, and deep enough in each category that a browser could spend an hour in the mystery section alone.

Dorothy Scrivner and the long second chapter

Dorothy Scrivner came to Albuquerque to study nursing at the University of New Mexico. She became a registered nurse, but she was also a reader, and the Menaul Book Exchange was one of her regular stops. She had been a customer at the original Eubank location and continued visiting after the move to Menaul Boulevard. In 1981, Juanita McCoach asked Scrivner if she wanted to work at the store a couple of days a week. Except for an eight-month period when she returned to nursing, Scrivner never left.

The McCoaches sold the business after running it for approximately twelve years. Scrivner continued working at the store through the ownership transitions, learning the trade from the inside — the buying decisions, the pricing, the customer relationships, the daily logistics of managing a high-volume used-book operation. In 1998, she became the owner. She would run Menaul Book Exchange for the next twenty-five years, from 1998 until the final day of business on September 8, 2023.

Scrivner's tenure represents the longest continuous period of leadership in the store's history. Under her ownership, the store maintained its identity as a genre-focused used bookstore serving the NE Heights neighborhoods. She knew her customers, knew what they read, and could locate a specific title in the 200,000-volume inventory with the kind of immediate recall that only comes from decades of daily familiarity with a stock. Customers who called the store could describe a book they were looking for — sometimes vaguely — and Scrivner could often identify it and confirm whether it was on the shelf, all within the space of a phone call.

What the store stocked

Menaul Book Exchange was a genre bookstore in the best sense of that term. The inventory reflected what Albuquerque's everyday readers actually read, rather than what a literary curator thought they should read. The stock categories included:

• Mysteries and thrillers. One of the store's strongest categories. The mystery section was deep enough to include not just the bestselling authors of the moment but the backlists that mystery readers work through methodically — the complete works of a favored author, purchased one or two volumes at a time over months of visits.
• Romance novels. The store carried an extensive romance section, including the Harlequin and Silhouette series titles that had enormous readerships during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. These series titles are difficult to find in other retail environments; a used bookstore with a committed romance readership is often the only reliable source.
• Westerns. Menaul Book Exchange was known for carrying hard-to-find older western novels — the kind of mid-century and late-century western fiction that goes out of print quickly and is not reprinted. For readers of the genre, and for New Mexico readers in particular, this was a meaningful resource.
• Science fiction and fantasy. Standard genre coverage with enough depth to include backlist titles and older editions that had cycled out of print.
• Military fiction and nonfiction. A category that reflects the demographics of Albuquerque's NE Heights, with its proximity to Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Laboratories. The military reading community in Albuquerque has always been substantial, and Menaul Book Exchange served it.
• Cookbooks. A perennial category in used bookstores, and one that Menaul kept well-stocked.
• Poetry. A smaller section than the genre categories, but present — an acknowledgment that some customers read across the spectrum.
• Children's literature. The store maintained a selection of children's books, serving families in the surrounding neighborhoods.

The common thread across all of these categories is that Menaul Book Exchange served readers, not collectors. The store was not a place to find first editions or rare imprints. It was a place to find the next book in a series you were reading, or a bag of paperbacks for a weekend, or a cookbook your grandmother used to have. That distinction matters for understanding both the store's role in the community and the nature of the books that passed through it.

The community role

A used bookstore that operates in the same location for nearly five decades becomes something more than a retail business. It becomes part of the neighborhood infrastructure. Menaul Book Exchange was that for the NE Heights. Families who started shopping there in the 1970s brought their children in the 1990s. Retirees who discovered the store after moving to Albuquerque became weekly regulars. The store was a constant in a commercial landscape that changed around it — strip malls renovated, businesses turned over, the character of Menaul Boulevard shifted — but the bookstore remained.

The store was also a social space in the quiet way that used bookstores are. Browsing is a solitary activity, but the conversation at the counter is not. Dorothy Scrivner and her staff knew their regulars by name, knew what they read, and could recommend the next book based on years of accumulated knowledge about a customer's tastes. That kind of personalized bookselling — impossible in a chain store, increasingly rare in any retail environment — was part of what kept customers returning for decades.

For the broader Albuquerque book community, Menaul Book Exchange served a function that is easy to overlook: it kept books in circulation. The exchange model means that a paperback mystery purchased new in 1985 might have passed through four or five readers by the time the store closed in 2023, each transaction keeping the book alive and in use rather than sitting on a shelf or going to the landfill. Over forty-eight years, the total number of reading transactions facilitated by Menaul Book Exchange is difficult to estimate, but the scale was enormous. This was a store that moved books by the hundreds of thousands, year after year, into the hands of people who actually read them.

The forty-eight-year run

Forty-eight years is an extraordinary lifespan for any retail business, and an almost unheard-of one for an independent used bookstore. To put that in context: Menaul Book Exchange opened during the Ford administration and closed during the Biden administration. It survived the rise and fall of the major chain bookstores — Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Borders, and the expansion and contraction of Barnes & Noble. It survived the arrival of Amazon in the late 1990s and the subsequent devastation of the independent bookselling market. It survived the rise of e-readers and digital books in the 2010s. It survived the pandemic shutdowns of 2020 and 2021.

Each of those disruptions eliminated bookstores across the country. Page One Books, Albuquerque's largest independent bookstore, closed in 2015 after thirty-four years. Living Batch, the literary bookstore in Nob Hill, closed in the 1990s. Dozens of other Albuquerque bookstores opened and closed during the decades that Menaul Book Exchange operated. That it survived as long as it did speaks to the fundamental soundness of the used-exchange model — low overhead, loyal customer base, inventory that replenishes itself through trade-ins — and to the steadiness of Scrivner's management over her twenty-five-year ownership period.

The store's longevity also means that its impact on Albuquerque's reading culture is cumulative. A bookstore that operates for five years touches some lives. A bookstore that operates for nearly fifty years becomes woven into the fabric of a neighborhood. Three generations of NE Heights families passed through Menaul Book Exchange. The books they read shaped their inner lives in ways that are impossible to quantify but real nonetheless.

How Menaul books appear in estate libraries

I write about this because it is directly relevant to the work I do. When I walk into an Albuquerque estate — a house in the NE Heights being cleared after a death, a downsizing, or a family transition — I frequently encounter books that came through Menaul Book Exchange. The markers are recognizable once you know what to look for.

Identifying characteristics of Menaul Book Exchange stock:

• Penciled pricing on the inside front cover or first page. Menaul Book Exchange used the standard used-bookstore convention of penciling prices lightly inside the cover. The pencil marks are typically small and neat — a practice that Scrivner maintained consistently.
• Small price stickers on genre paperbacks, particularly on the spine or inside cover. The stickers varied over the decades but were generally simple and understated.
• The condition profile. Books that passed through a high-volume used exchange tend to show reading wear — cracked spines on paperbacks, slight yellowing on pages, the general signs of a book that was read and then traded in. This is different from the condition profile of books purchased new and shelved; Menaul books were working copies, read by multiple owners.
• Genre concentrations. When I encounter an estate library with deep shelves of mass-market mysteries, romance series, or westerns — particularly in the NE Heights — the probability that many of those books came through Menaul Book Exchange is high. The store was the primary source for genre paperbacks in that part of the city for decades.

Understanding this provenance matters for authentication and assessment work. A book that passed through Menaul Book Exchange is not a rare find in the collector sense. It is a reading copy that served its purpose, and the pencil marks and wear are part of its honest history. The value of these books is not monetary in most cases — it is functional. They are books that still want to be read, and my job is to get them to the next reader rather than treating them as inventory to be discarded.

The closure: September 2023

Menaul Book Exchange closed permanently on September 8, 2023. The proximate cause was the sale of the building — the property was purchased and would become the base of a construction company, and the bookstore's space was not going to be retained. Dorothy Scrivner, after forty-two years at the store and twenty-five years as its owner, decided to retire rather than attempt a relocation.

The decision was shaped by multiple factors beyond the building sale. The competitive landscape for used bookstores had been deteriorating for years. Digital book sales, online used-book marketplaces, and changing reading habits had all reduced the foot traffic that a brick-and-mortar used bookstore depends on. Neighborhood safety concerns along the Menaul corridor had also become a factor. The building sale was the catalyst, but the broader pressures were real.

In the weeks before the closure, the store held a clearance sale, offering its remaining inventory at bulk prices. Customers came in volume — some to buy books, some to say goodbye to a store they had visited for decades. The 200,000-volume inventory dispersed into the Albuquerque secondhand market: some books went to other used-book dealers, some to charitable organizations, some to individual buyers who carried out bags of books at the clearance price. The dispersal of that inventory is itself a significant event in the local book ecosystem. Books that had been concentrated in one location — organized, browsable, accessible — scattered across the city in a matter of weeks.

The legacy

Menaul Book Exchange was not a famous bookstore. It was not written up in national publications. It did not host celebrated author readings or cultivate a literary reputation. What it did was more fundamental: it kept books in the hands of readers for forty-eight years. It provided affordable reading material to a community that wanted it. It gave a second life — and often a third, fourth, and fifth life — to paperback novels that would otherwise have been discarded after a single reading.

The store's legacy is distributed across thousands of bookshelves in the NE Heights and beyond. Every mystery novel with a penciled price on the inside cover, every romance series gathered one volume at a time over months of visits, every western that a retired reader picked up on a Tuesday afternoon errand run on Menaul — these are the artifacts of a forty-eight-year relationship between a bookstore and its community. The artifacts are modest. The relationship was not.

For the work I do — walking through Albuquerque estates, assessing libraries, sorting books for their next destination — Menaul Book Exchange is part of the landscape I navigate. When I open a box of paperbacks from an NE Heights estate and see the penciled prices and the familiar condition profile, I know where those books came from. I know what kind of reader bought them, and I know what kind of store sold them. That knowledge does not change what I do with the books. But it adds a layer of understanding to the work, and it connects the individual estate to a broader story about reading in Albuquerque — a story in which Menaul Book Exchange was a quiet, steady, essential chapter for nearly half a century.

For collectors tracking signed copies through Albuquerque's used-book ecosystem, Menaul Book Exchange was not a primary source of signed first editions in the way that a literary bookstore or rare-book dealer would be. However, signed copies did pass through the store's inventory — books traded in by readers who had attended author events at other venues, or books acquired from estate sales and donated collections that contained inscribed copies. The store was a node in the circulation network, and signed books moved through it the same way unsigned books did.

The other bookstores in Albuquerque's history each served a different audience and filled a different role. Bookworks serves the literary and community-events audience. Title Wave operates the library-surplus model. Page One served the general new-book market until 2015. Menaul Book Exchange served the used-genre-paperback reader — and for forty-eight years, it served that reader better than anyone else in the city.

If you are clearing an estate with Menaul Book Exchange books

If you are clearing a home in Albuquerque's NE Heights — or anywhere in the metro area — and you encounter boxes of genre paperbacks with penciled prices and the reading wear that comes from the used-exchange cycle, here is what I would suggest:

1. Do not assume the books are worthless. Most mass-market paperbacks have minimal resale value individually, but they still have reading value. Many genres — westerns, older romance series, military fiction — have active readerships looking for exactly these titles.
2. Check for signed copies. They turn up in unexpected places. A paperback with an author's signature on the title page may have been traded in by someone who attended a reading and did not realize the signature added interest to the book. My first-edition identification guide can help you assess what you are holding.
3. Look at the complete runs. If a reader was collecting a mystery series through Menaul Book Exchange over a period of years, the complete run may have more interest as a set than the individual volumes do separately.
4. Do not strip the pencil marks. They are part of the book's provenance and do not significantly affect value for reading copies. Erasing them removes a small piece of the book's history for no practical benefit.
5. Consider the volume. A Menaul Book Exchange reader who visited weekly for twenty years may have accumulated hundreds or thousands of books. If you are facing a library of that scale, professional assessment can save you time and ensure that nothing of interest is overlooked.