Our Story

The Living Room Harvest Book Company started in 1988 as a small, used bookshop. Boy we were young back then. We loved books and constantly packed the little Honda Civic to the brim, as we made daily book-buying house calls to stock our shelves. Although we eventually bought a fancy typewriter (electric because we were so cutting edge), in the beginning it was all pencils and postcards and paper receipts.

After two retail locations and with our new, tiny Macintosh Classic computer, we started a database of our small inventory. At the end of our lease, we decided to go “mail order” (pr[e]-commerce) and work out of the living room. (see photo) Those were definitely the Garage Band days. But, like all good garage bands, we eventually moved out of the house, spurred on by the Internet and because a newborn baby wanted the space. We have been in a series of offices and warehouses in Ft. Washington, PA since 1997. We opened an outlet store here in 2000, and operated a second store in Media, PA from 2004 to 2008. While most of our now 140,000+ volume inventory sells on-line, it’s great to be open to share all of the books with the browsing public and to have places for folks to bring books to sell.

From pencils to pixels, book selling has changed much over the last two decades. What hasn’t changed at Harvest Book Company is our love of books, our hard work in buying as many of them as possible, and our commitment to finding them new homes as joyfully as possible. Thanks for stopping by.