Powell's Books

Powell's City of Books, the flagship of Powell's Books, filling its corner of downtown Portland, Oregon, photographed in 2008. The store spans an entire city block, and its nine color-coded rooms hold new, used, rare and out-of-print books under one roof. The scale is the whole point: a single visit can run from the main fiction shelves to a corner of the rare stock you never meant to find, and it is easy to spend a full day without leaving the building.