Title Wave Books
Albuquerque's University-Area Used Bookstore Since 1994

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

Founding and the first two decades

Title Wave Books opened in September 1994 at 2318 Wisconsin Street NE in Albuquerque, in the University area near the University of New Mexico campus. From the beginning it was a used bookstore — not a new-book independent, not a chain outlet, but a store that dealt exclusively in secondhand and previously owned books. The founding was woman-led, and the store has remained woman-owned through its entire history, a detail worth noting in an era when independent bookstore ownership skews heavily toward that demographic anyway but was less common in the mid-1990s.

The choice of location was deliberate. Wisconsin Street sits in the residential grid just north of the UNM campus, in the kind of neighborhood where students rent houses, faculty walk to work, and the foot traffic is driven by the university calendar. A used bookstore in that location had a natural audience: students looking for affordable reading copies, faculty clearing their offices, graduate students building personal libraries on stipend budgets, and the broader community of readers who gravitate toward university neighborhoods because that is where the bookstores and coffee shops concentrate.

For its first two decades, Title Wave operated under its original ownership and built the reputation that sustains it today. The store became known for three things: a genuinely large used-book inventory, careful organization across hundreds of categories, and a buyback and trade-in program that kept books circulating through the University-area community rather than ending up in landfills or storage units. That circulation model — buy from the community, sell back to the community — is the economic engine that distinguishes a used bookstore from a new-book retailer, and Title Wave executed it well enough to survive for twenty years before its ownership transition.

The University-area context

To understand what Title Wave is, you need to understand where it sits. The University area of Albuquerque — roughly bounded by Central Avenue to the south, I-25 to the west, Lomas to the north, and the residential streets east of campus — is the densest concentration of reading culture in the city. UNM itself is a Carnegie R1 research university with strong humanities departments, a nationally recognized Creative Writing Program, and a student body of around 25,000. The neighborhoods surrounding campus house a mix of students, faculty, staff, and longtime residents who chose to live near the university for cultural rather than economic reasons.

This is the market that Title Wave serves. A student finishing a literature course and looking to sell the semester's reading. A retiring professor clearing decades of accumulated books from an office. A graduate student in anthropology who needs a shelf of Southwest history at used-book prices. A neighborhood reader who browses every Saturday and trades in finished novels for unread ones. The store's proximity to UNM is not incidental to its identity — it is the identity. Title Wave exists because the University of New Mexico creates a community of readers and book-handlers who need a place to exchange what they have read for what they want to read next.

The relationship between a university and its neighborhood used bookstore is symbiotic in a way that new-book stores cannot replicate. A new-book retailer like Bookworks orders from publishers and sells at cover price. The stock is predictable, current, and new. Title Wave's stock arrives through the back door — in boxes carried in by students, in estate lots purchased from families, in the trade-in bags of Saturday regulars. Nobody, including the owners, knows exactly what will be on the shelf next week. That unpredictability is what makes used bookstores worth browsing. You find books you did not know you were looking for.

What a used-book specialization actually means

Title Wave carries over 23,000 books organized across nearly 400 categories. That is a large inventory for a used bookstore — not enormous by the standards of a warehouse operation, but substantial for a neighborhood store in a single location. The categories span the full range of general reading: fiction, literature, biography, memoir, history, political science, cooking, children's books, young adult, Christian genres, Southwest and Native American titles, science, philosophy, and a notably deep homeschooling section that has been a distinguishing feature of the store since its early years.

The used-book model works differently from new-book retail in every significant way. Inventory is acquired through buyback (the store pays cash for books it can resell), trade-in (the store offers store credit, typically at a higher rate than cash), estate purchases, and community donations. Pricing is set by the store based on condition, demand, and replacement cost — not by a publisher's suggested retail price. The result is a store where a novel that retails new at a substantial price might sit on the shelf for a fraction of that amount, in perfectly readable condition, with nothing wrong with it except that someone else read it first.

For readers on a budget — and students are always on a budget — this model is not just convenient, it is essential. A university student who reads widely outside their coursework can build a real personal library through used bookstores in a way that would be financially impossible at new-book prices. Title Wave has been enabling that kind of library-building in the UNM neighborhood for over thirty years.

The store maintains quality standards for its buyback program. Books in poor condition — torn pages, water damage, heavy highlighting, cigarette odor, pest damage — are declined. This curation matters. It means the shelf stock at Title Wave is genuinely browsable, not a thrift-store jumble of damaged paperbacks. The books are organized, categorized, and in readable condition. That is what separates a good used bookstore from a bad one, and Title Wave has been consistent about it.

How Title Wave differs from Albuquerque's new-book stores

Albuquerque has had several significant new-book independent bookstores over the decades. Page One Books was the large general-interest indie in the NE Heights that operated from 1981 until its closure in 2015. Bookworks has operated in the North Valley since 1984 and remains open. Both stores ordered from publishers, carried current releases, hosted major author tours, and priced at cover. They were bookstores in the traditional independent-retail sense.

Title Wave occupies a different niche entirely. It does not compete with Bookworks for the customer who wants the new novel that came out last Tuesday. It serves the customer who wants last year's novel, or the novel from five years ago, or the out-of-print title that no new-book store can order because the publisher remaindered it a decade ago. The two models complement each other. A healthy book ecosystem in a city needs both — stores that carry what is new and stores that carry what has been read and released back into circulation.

The economic reality is also different. A new-book independent typically buys from publishers at a wholesale discount and sells at the cover price, with margins of roughly 40 percent before expenses. A used-book store buys from individuals at a fraction of the resale price and sells at whatever the local market will bear. The margins can be higher on individual transactions, but the volume is lower and the acquisition process is labor-intensive — every book that comes through the buyback counter requires individual evaluation. Title Wave handles this by accepting books during regular business hours and maintaining clear standards about what it will and will not take.

The 2015 ownership transition

On July 1, 2015, Leslie Gulley and Liberty Goldstein took over ownership of Title Wave Books. The transition was notable for several reasons. Liberty had originally been hired to organize the store's homeschooling section — a category that had become increasingly important to the store's customer base. She and Leslie, who were best friends, saw an opportunity to take over the store rather than let it close or change hands to an owner who might not maintain its character. They used crowdfunding to help finance the purchase, which is itself a signal of how embedded the store was in its community — people contributed because they wanted Title Wave to continue existing.

The new owners added "Revised" to the store's name — Title Wave Books, Revised — to signal the change in ownership while preserving the brand identity that three decades of customers recognized. The move was smart. It communicated continuity and change simultaneously: same store, same location, same used-book model, but new hands on the operation and a willingness to update what needed updating.

Under Gulley and Goldstein's ownership, the store has continued to build on its established strengths while adding community programming. Title Wave now hosts author signings, open mic nights, book clubs, and community book swaps. They also participate in Animal Humane New Mexico's C.A.T.S. program, hosting adoptable cats in the store — a feature that has become part of the store's identity and has resulted in over sixty cats finding permanent homes through in-store adoptions. It is a detail that sounds quirky but reflects something real about the store's role: it is a community space, not just a retail operation.

What kind of books move through Title Wave

The inventory at a used bookstore is a portrait of what a community reads. What moves through Title Wave's shelves tells you something about the reading habits of the University area and greater Albuquerque. Based on the store's category structure and its location near UNM, the books that circulate through Title Wave include:

• Course-adjacent reading. Not textbooks primarily (Title Wave is selective about older textbooks and declines outdated editions), but the novels, histories, and nonfiction titles that students read for courses and then release when the semester ends. A used bookstore near a university is constantly receiving last semester's reading lists.
• General literary fiction. The reliable backbone of any used bookstore — novels from the past several decades, in paperback and hardcover, ranging from popular bestsellers to serious literary fiction. The UNM proximity means the literary-fiction section tends to be deeper than at a used bookstore in a non-university neighborhood.
• Southwest and Native American titles. Albuquerque generates and consumes a significant amount of regional literature. Local authors appear frequently in used-bookstore stock because their books are widely owned in the community. Tony Hillerman, Rudolfo Anaya, and other Southwest literary figures are staples.
• Children's and young adult books. Title Wave carries a deep children's section, which is sustained by the family demographics of the surrounding neighborhoods and the store's reputation among homeschooling families.
• Homeschooling materials. This is a distinguishing category for Title Wave. The store has been described as the only place in Albuquerque to find a comprehensive selection of homeschooling books and curricula, and it was Liberty Goldstein's work organizing this section that eventually led to the 2015 ownership transition.
• Biographies, memoirs, and history. The university audience drives strong demand for nonfiction in these categories. Faculty libraries, when they are donated or sold, tend to be heavy on history and biography.
• Cooking, crafts, and practical nonfiction. The categories that fill out the inventory of any general used bookstore — books that people buy, use, and eventually release.

The store also sells DVDs, music CDs, vinyl LPs, and audiobook CDs through the same buyback model. These media categories are declining in volume industry-wide, but a used-media store near a university still finds demand, particularly for vinyl among the student demographic that has driven the resurgence of record collecting.

Estate implications

From the perspective of someone handling an Albuquerque estate — which is the context in which the New Mexico Literacy Project encounters bookstores — Title Wave matters in two directions.

First, as a destination. When a family is clearing a household and the estate contains books in good condition, Title Wave is one of the legitimate options for responsible disposition. The store will evaluate books at its buyback counter and offer cash or store credit for titles it can resell. This is not a donation — it is a commercial transaction — but it ensures the books re-enter the reading community rather than going to a landfill. For estates with several hundred general-reading books in good condition, a used bookstore like Title Wave is often the most appropriate channel. Not every book in an estate is a first edition or a collector's item. Most are reading copies that have value to the next reader, not to the collector market.

Second, as provenance. Books purchased at Title Wave carry the store's pricing marks and sometimes its stickers or stamps. When I encounter a shelf of used books in an Albuquerque estate that came from a University-area household, Title Wave provenance is common. It tells me something about the reader: they were budget-conscious, community-oriented, and located near UNM. It does not tell me the book is rare or valuable — a book purchased used at Title Wave is, by definition, already on its second or third owner. But it does tell me the household was a reading household, and reading households are the ones where interesting books hide among the ordinary ones.

The distinction matters for anyone handling estate books in Albuquerque. A shelf full of books from Title Wave is a shelf that was assembled by a reader — someone who browsed, selected, and chose specific titles from a curated used-book inventory. That reader may also have acquired books from other sources: new-book stores, online retailers, gifts, inheritance. The Title Wave books are the ones that tell you the person was actively engaged in Albuquerque's used-book ecosystem, which in turn suggests they were the kind of reader who might also have picked up something genuinely interesting along the way.

Community role and what it means to still be open

Title Wave Books has been in continuous operation for over thirty years. That fact alone is notable. Independent bookstores close constantly — the economics are difficult, the competition from online retailers is relentless, and the foot traffic in brick-and-mortar retail has been declining for two decades. Title Wave has survived because it occupies a specific niche (used books, not new), serves a specific community (the University area), and has been managed by owners who understand that a used bookstore is a community institution, not just a retail business.

The store's community programming — author events, open mics, book clubs, cat adoptions — is part of that institutional role. These are not profit centers. They are reasons for people to walk through the door, browse the shelves, and remember that a physical bookstore exists in their neighborhood. In an era when any book can be ordered online and delivered in two days, the only competitive advantage a physical used bookstore has is the experience of being in it: the serendipity of browsing, the conversation with the staff, the cat asleep on a stack of biographies.

Title Wave is consistently voted among the top bookstores in Albuquerque, which is a meaningful distinction in a city that takes its bookstores seriously. Albuquerque has always been a reading city — the university, the national laboratories, the arts community, and the literary culture surrounding Southwest writing all contribute to a population that reads more, and more seriously, than the national average. A used bookstore that has survived for three decades in that environment has earned its place.

For the bookstore-history cluster I am building on this site, Title Wave represents something important: a store that is still operating. Most of the bookstores I document — Page One, Living Batch, Salt of the Earth — are closed. Their histories are memorial. Title Wave's history is ongoing. The store is still buying and selling books, still hosting events, still placing cats in homes, still serving the University-area community that has sustained it since 1994. That continuity is the story.

Why I wrote this page

I document Albuquerque's bookstores because bookstores are where reading culture lives in physical form. Each store — closed or still operating — represents a set of decisions about what books matter, who reads them, and how they circulate through a community. Title Wave's decisions have been consistent for over thirty years: used books, fair prices, community trade-ins, careful organization, and a location near the university that generates and sustains the reading population.

If you are handling an estate in the University area and the bookshelves contain Title Wave stickers or pricing marks, you are looking at a household that participated in Albuquerque's used-book circulation. That is not a provenance marker that changes the monetary value of any individual book. But it is a marker that tells you the reader was engaged, deliberate, and part of a community that values books as objects worth keeping, trading, and passing along. That is exactly the kind of household where a careful sort is worth the time.