Donate Books in the East Mountains

The East Mountains—Edgewood, Tijeras, Cedar Crest, Sandia Park—are where people come to breathe. Artists and retirees escape city density for mountain quiet, families build homes with real land, and longtime residents watch generations settle in and grow roots. With that space comes libraries—painters with art books and exhibition catalogs, retired professors whose careers are written on their shelves, collectors whose hobbies have filled whole rooms over decades. And eventually, many of these communities face the question: what happens to it all?

If you're managing a significant collection—a barn of books, a lifetime library, boxes stacked in storage—the East Mountains' distance from Albuquerque matters. I get that. For families with larger donations, the drive is absolutely worth it. Call me in advance to coordinate, and I'll make sure your drop-off is easy. My facility at 5445 Edith Blvd NE, Unit A is built to handle substantial loads, and I'm ready to help clear even the most impressive collections.

I donate children's books free to UNM Children's Hospital, care facilities, and rural communities in the area. Your mountain collection—those art books, histories, vintage volumes, whatever they are—find new readers instead of ending up in a landfill. Call 702-496-4214 to discuss large donations.

How Far Is the Drop-Off?

From the East Mountains to my donation center at 5445 Edith Blvd NE, Unit A is approximately 35 minutes from Edgewood, and up to an hour from the higher elevations. Yes, it's a drive—but for families with large collections or full vehicle loads, it's a one-trip solution that clears the clutter once and for all.

What I Accept

• ✓ Books of any genre, condition, or age—hardcover, paperback, textbooks, collections, bulk quantities
• ✓ DVDs & Blu-rays—movies, documentaries, TV series in any condition
• ✓ CDs—music, audiobooks, educational materials
• ✓ Large quantities—barn clearouts, estate collections, storage unit contents. The bigger the load, the better.

Why Make the Drive to Donate with me?

If you're in the East Mountains with substantial collections, here's what makes us worth the trip:

Free In-Home Book Pickup Across the East Mountains

The East Mountains is the one pickup zone where the drive time makes the free in-home service the genuinely better option — I cover Tijeras, Cedar Crest, Sandia Park, Sandia Crest, Cedar Grove, and the Manzano foothills communities east of the crest. If you're on a half-acre-plus parcel off NM-14 (the Turquoise Trail) or NM-337 (the South 14), a pickup saves you the 35–45 minute drive to Edith and Montano. Because East Mountains homes often have dedicated library rooms, cabin-style shelving, or basement-full collections, I come with the truck sized for the job and don't bill per box.

Sub-areas served across the East Mountains

I run pickups throughout Tijeras, Cedar Crest (Historic Turquoise Trail), Sandia Park, Sandia Knolls, Sandia Crest residences, Paa-Ko Ridge, the Frost Road / Juan Tomas / Chililí corridor, Cedar Grove, San Antonito, Escabosa, and the parcels along the Mountain Road / NM-337 corridor as far south as Manzano. My Edgewood neighborhood page covers the east end of I-40, and Placitas sits at the north edge of the Sandias on its own page.

What pickups typically look like here

East Mountains pickups are the largest-per-stop in the metro. Many owners are retired Sandia Labs scientists, retired UNM faculty, retired judges and attorneys who moved out to the mountains for the land, the quiet, and the wall space for a real library. Collections reliably include technical and scientific reference (physics, geology, archaeology), Native American studies, Southwestern regional history, outdoor/naturalist writing, and the hardcover literary canon of the 1960s–2000s. I've done 80-box single-parcel pickups in Cedar Crest without blinking, and I'll come back for a second run if the first truck fills.

Literary provenance I see on this side of town

East Mountains shelves are the richest in the metro for nature-and-landscape writing — Edward Abbey (Abbey's 1956 UNM philosophy thesis was "Anarchism and the Morality of Violence" and his work reads at home out here), John Nichols (Taos connection, land-grant and acequia history), Leslie Marmon Silko, Frank Waters (The Man Who Killed the Deer 1942, Book of the Hopi 1963 — near-universal in the Sandia/Manzano/Jemez landscape libraries up here), and deep runs of Terry Tempest Williams, William deBuys, and Stanley Crawford. The Pueblo-facing side of the mountains — Tijeras, Cedar Crest east of Sandia Crest — also reliably turns up N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer-winning House Made of Dawn (1968), Simon Ortiz, and Luci Tapahonso on Native-educator shelves. Mountains collections also reliably contain the Tony Hillerman Leaphorn/Chee series (often in hardcover first editions because East Mountains readers buy new). Photography households bring Ansel Adams monographs alongside the naturalist canon.

If your shelves have a Moby Dickens (Taos, 1984–2018) sticker or a Bookworks stamp, that's a mountains-reader signal — and one the library-worth tool will flag as material worth sorting carefully.