If you’ve ever had the blues on a Sunday afternoon — maybe dreading Monday morning or regretting Saturday night — there’s a book-centered bazaar for your end-of-the-week enjoyment.
A Good Used Bookstore hosts its Sunday Funday Market each week in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown near Echo Park. On Aug. 30, last Sunday, the compact store was full of shoppers browsing the shelves or stepping outside to sample the cozy market’s wares, which included a pizza pop-up and other edible treats, along with vintage clothing, handcrafted perfumes and more.
Map: 100 Southern California independent bookstores to visit in 2026
In the midst of browsers and buyers, A Good Used Bookstore co-owners Chris Capizzi and Jenny Yang operated the bookstore like good hosts, chatting with shoppers, answering questions, finding books and generally being all over the place inside and out without seeming to break a sweat.
There’s a reason for that.
“We’ve done maybe 150 of these Sunday events,” says Capizzi, adding that they’ve added activities on the first and third Saturdays, too. “We do kitten rescue with local adoption organizations.” (The next one is Sept. 5!)
The store, which opened in October 2023, will reach its third anniversary next month, a milestone they plan to celebrate during the Sunday Oct. 11 CicLAvia event.
Yang and Capizzi started out in 2017 doing pop-ups at the Melrose Trading Post, Rose Bowl Flea Market, Long Beach Antique Market and Santa Monica Airport Market. Then during the pandemic, they pivoted to Instagram and online-focused sales.
“The way we survived the pandemic was posting books to Instagram Stories. We’d do a book a minute for an hour, three times a week,” says Capizzi. “We would just sling books on Instagram.”
The store has a lively presence on the social media platform; its feed displays photo galleries of local shoppers and their newfound treasures. Inside the shop, whose utilitarian simplicity Capizzi describes as “scrappy,” books line the walls, vintage paperbacks rest in wooden crates and the shelves are made from wood purchased and cut at Silverlake’s family-owned Baller Hardware.
“All the legs underneath the tables are from a flea market,” he says. “The art books are all on shelves made from cinder blocks.”
Somehow, he says, it just works. “I don’t really know how to explain the secret sauce,” he says of the store’s approach to selling used and vintage books.
“Our perspective on those things may be different. Neither one of us studied literature or writing or anything. I mean, I studied film, theater, and screenwriting, and Jenny is a fine art documentary photographer,” he says. “Those are previous lives because we’ve been doing this for so long. But I think that helped us stay open as booksellers to a lot of categories and genres.”
“We also try to be broad enough,” he says, pointing to the wild diversity of nonfiction paperbacks as an example. “The nonfiction in vintage mass market paperbacks is almost like the internet in print. It’s just the most random sort of topics and interests that only the human mind could provide.”
In another unusual angle for a used bookstore, the couple shrink-wraps its vintage mass-market paperbacks, making them easier to look through, if not to open up and read, in the shop.
“It was really Jenny’s idea from being at the flea markets,” says Capizzi, whose father and grandfather had owned a record store and was familiar with shrink-wrapped product.
“Jenny saw the paperbacks and the covers were so beautiful; she was like, ‘We should put them out like records, so people can go cover to cover,’” he says, which is especially useful when doing events like LITLIT: The Little Literary Fair or The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
“We also travel with them, and so the shrinkwrap helps protect them, helps you be able to flip through them,” he says. “With each flip, I feel like there’s this little ping, and it’s kind of strangely similar to scrolling on a phone.”
While Capizzi and Yang are looking forward to the anniversary celebration, they continue to look for new ways the store can grow and try new things, he says.
“Jenny likes to say that she would rather go back to eighth grade than the first year of opening the bookstore because it was just so hard to figure these things out. We had never worked in a bookstore. We weren’t even really good retail employees at other places,” he laughs.
“And so it’s been a lot of figuring it out.”
A Good Used Book, 307 Glendale Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026
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