Capitol Hill Books

“Brown paper packages tied up with string, these are a few of my favorite things.” Julie Andrews was onto something when she sang that snippet. Who doesn’t get an anticipatory thrill when they discover that a package has arrived at their doorstep?

We at Capitol Hill Books savor providing people with their favorite things no matter if they live two blocks or two states away from us. That is why we offer shipping services to our customer for any purchases made at Capitol Hill Books. As long as the address is in the United States, we can ship anywhere (Well…almost anywhere. We can’t ship to prisons).

We package our orders right at our on-site shipping facilities and you can be sure that our packaging is done professionally using high-quality materials to protect the contents inside. We can ship individual books or dozens of books and only charge a nominal fee to cover the shipping cost and materials. We primarily use low-cost media mail for shipping books, but we can often ship items using USPS expedited mail for a quicker delivery time.

So whether you are an out-of-town visitor wanting to ship books home or a local wanting to surprise a loved-one with a brown-paper package, look to Capitol Hill Books to provide professional packing services for your books and gifts.

Call us at 303.837.077 or email us at info@capitolhillbooks.com for more information about our shipping services.

We here at Capitol Hill Books just love it when we’re able to help members of the community. We get a thrill when we get the call about how Capitol Hill Books can support a cause or be part of a project.

Which is why we were so excited to hear about 14-year old Wryn’s awesome Eagle Scout project. Wryn is a very ambitious kid. Most boy scouts don’t receive their Eagle Scout rank until 16 or 17, yet Wryn completed his before he even finished his freshman year in high school.

Wryn’s project came from talking to his former teacher Scharlotte Bowles at Platte River Academy about how to encourage kids to enjoy reading.

“There are a lot of teenagers out there who don’t like what they read and if I could give them an opportunity to read something that would interesting, they’d have a spark in their love of reading,” Wryn said.

Wryn’s project was multi-faceted. First he hand-built several large bookshelves for the classroom. Then he raised money by asking the local PTA and friends and family for funds to buy books. Then with about $600 in hand, he thought of the best place to get the most books for the least amount of money.

That was when Wryn contacted us. He originally thought to do a book drive but worried that he’d get a bunch of random Danielle Steel novels, not the type of books that would typically inspire a middle-schooler. So we immediately went to work when he contacted us, rummaging through our collections to find the books from a list Ms. Bowles prepared and suggesting dozens of titles on our own. Together we came up with 130 books for Ms. Bowles’ classroom.

Wryn has only to pass through the Boy Scouts Board of Review to get his Eagle Scout. He feels confident he’ll get his Eagle Scout since he has a track record of service with the scouts including maintaining trails and helping clean neighbor’s houses. Wryn definitely is a bright young man with a great looking future ahead of him and we’re just glad to help him with his goals.

And of course we’d be happy to help with your project too. Need books for a specific purpose? Want to know if Capitol Hill Books can provide a donation of books, gift certificates or even money to a charitable cause? Or do you simply need a space to inform the community about your upcoming event or project? Capitol Hill Books can help in a variety of community endeavors. Just give us a call at 303.837.0700 or e-mail us at Info@capitolhillbooks.com to see what we can do for you.

Our good friend and neighbor Wolfe’s Barbeque is closing after 25 years in business. Owner Louis Wolfe has been serving up delicious and affordable BBQ for more than a quarter century. He has decided that now is the time to “reinvent” himself and close his wonderful restaurant after Christmas, the day when Wolfe opens up annually to serve his affordable BBQ to the masses when many other places are closed.

We wish Mr. Wolfe the best on his new life journey and will of course miss his cheerful presence on our block. Please do yourself a favor and visit his establishment one last time if you can. You’ll be experiencing Mr. Wolfe’s passion and dedication to delicious BBQ that has kept hearts and stomachs full through five presidential administrations.

And when we at Capitol Hill Books think of the departure of Wolfe’s Barbeque from our block, we are reminded of the arch that once stood in front of Union Station with the Hebrew blessing, “Mizpah.”

After you gorge yourself on the black Friday sales at the big boxes, remember your local small businesses during the holiday season. Small businesses like Capitol Hill Books often offer a more eclectic selection, better customer service and even better discounts than the mall.

And best of all, small businesses keep our community active and vibrant. Just imagine Colfax, Highlands Square or South Broadway without the hundreds of small businesses that keep these areas so uniquely Denver.

There is actually a national trend to support “Small Business Saturday,” as a day to go out and share the love of your favorite small businesses all across the country.

So this Saturday, November 27, Capitol Hill Books is getting on the “Small Business Saturday” bandwagon and offering a 10 percent discount on used books for anyone who mentions Small Business Saturday to us. So get out there and support your local small businesses and all the holiday cheer they give to our communities.

The gang of five met up at the old saloon to figure out if they had what it takes to win the competition of a lifetime. They trained hard all season; constantly barraging each other with trivial facts while they “worked” at a bookstore. The team couldn’t even use the bathroom without encountering a daily dose of knowledge.

And on Monday, November 15 all those weeks of training paid off and “The Grant Administration” trivia team triumphed over all pretenders (including a three-time Jeopardy! champion) at the Wyman’s trivia face-off.

The competition first tested our knowledge of the opening lines of popular musical arrangements. We knew all but the first line to Ray Parker’s “Ghostbusters” which turned out to be “If” instead of “When.”

Team member John showed he knows his devilish songs and Holly knows the transportation systems that killed many of her favorite celebrities. But unfortunately we have a lot to learn about shacks and Shaqs, as we only got three points out of eight on that round.

We rebounded nicely with a perfect round identifying celebrities named for creatures and our teammate Ben showed he was a pinch player with his outstanding knowledge of card games. Some good guesswork helped us in an audio round where we had to identify live-action children television programs. That’s so Raven, indeed.

But despite our fair successes at the night’s trivia, we were still in second place going into the final round of the competition: Random knowledge. Yet our knowledge of celebrity centenarians, Botswanan barrens and orthodox orthography led us to a stunning one-point victory!

So other pub quiz teams should watch out for the gang at Capitol Hill Books. Weeks of being surrounded by books has paid off in the knowledge department and we are ready to again meet other quiz teams in trivial battle.

We love movies at Capitol Hill Books. I for one am an opposite reader. I’ll watch a movie and immediately want to read the book it’s adapted from. “Wow!” I said after watching Jurassic Park. “I’ve got the Cliff Notes version of dinosaur DNA from this movie, now I want Michael Crichton to describe it to me in mundane scientific detail.”

We have absolutely no problem helping people who think the same way. Whether watching a movie makes you want to read a book or if you want to prepare yourself for the fall movie season by being able to compare “The Social Network” to Ben Mezrich’s “Accidental Billionaires: The Story of Facebook,” we got exactly what you need.

In fact, we can even get you free tickets to some movies. We just got free passes to an upcoming screening of the Clint Eastwood movie “Hereafter,” starring Matt Damon. We’re super grateful to Warner Bros. for providing these wonderful free screener tickets for our customers (while supplies last). And if you’re interested in the “Hereafter” after watching “Hereafter,” we have many books about amazing psychic exploration of the afterlife.

We also have Aron Ralston’s book “Between a Rock and Hard Place,” soon to be made into “127 Hours,” a movie starring James Franco and directed by Danny Boyle or “Slumdog Millionaire.” We also have Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” which will be adapted by the creative visionary Julie Taymor.

This fall and winter, be sure to check out the stories behind your favorite movies at Capitol Hill Books.

We’ve had an absolutely great summer here at Capitol Hill Books. We’re so happy that people seem to appreciate our little used bookstore after more than 30 years in business. Now that it’s the end of summer, we’ve made a few little improvements and added some new products for our customers. We’ll let the pictures show the story on this one.

We’ve added some more fun products for our customers including “optic bookmarks” that change when your perspective does, fun, beaded pen covers in explosive colors, inexpensive notebooks hand dyed by Indonesian free-trade artisans, locally produced buttons featuring artistic drawings of your favorite authors along with thought-provoking quotes, new post cards and greeting cards with bold images and even bolder messages and of course our popular and hilarious magnets.

We also continue to carry reading glasses in a variety of strengths and fun designs. Here are some fun new wardrobe magnets that allow you to dress up or down Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Come on in and put Einstein into a chicken suit.

Don’t worry. We’re not ignoring our books to push cards and magnets. We love our little inexpensive gift items, but we know that a bookstore still needs to be about the books. That is why we continue to work to make our bookstore more organized and easy to use for our customers. We recently added small alphabetic placards throughout many of our shelves to show customers exactly where author Trezza Azzopardi ends and author Isaac Babel begins. Yes, we have begun to alphabetize many of our most popular sections including fiction (both hardcover and small paperback), mystery, speculative fiction, and psychology. We hope that these placards will make it easier for our customers to find what they are looking for, but of course our staff is always ready to answer any questions.

We appreciate that our customers keep returning to our store and just want to let them know that we will keep striving to make the customer experience better. And that means hearing from you. Please let us know if you’d like to see any other changes at Capitol Hill Books. While we may not always be able to accommodate every suggestion, we’ll definitely take it seriously and try to figure out how we can make improvements. So go ahead..click the comment button, use our posted e-mail to send us a message, or simply come in the store and tell us what we can do to make the store work better for you.

Capitol Hill Books is a proud member of the Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Booksellers Association or RMABA. Members of this group are among the highest quality sellers of rare and antiquarian books in the country.

On August 6th and 7th, RMABA is putting on its annual Rocky Mountain Book and Paper Fair at the Denver Merchandise Mart. The fair is one of the nation’s premier events for anyone interested in collecting quality antiquarian books and ephemera. And although Capitol Hill Books will not be able to attend this year’s fair, we strongly encourage people to check out the merchants that will be in attendance.

And for people who are in Denver to check out the festival, we’d love for you to stop by Capitol Hill Books. Even though we won’t be selling at the fair, we still have a great selection of rare and antiquarian books including more than two dozen books published in the 1800s. And even in this digital age, holding a decades or even centuries old book is a thing of beauty.

For the second year in a row, the reader’s of 5280 Magazine have voted Capitol Hill Books as the best used bookstore in Denver. We’re proud to continue receiving awards after 30 years at our wonderful location, which as 5280 noted is “situated between a gritty stretch of Colfax and the more polished veneer of downtown.”

We’re just happy to have customers that appreciate our “Perfectly cluttered bookshelves,” and keep returning to our store even when new technologies present entirely different reading options than we can offer.

So thanks to 5280 Magazine, its readers and to our customers who continue to value books and our bookstore throughout our 30 years in business.

Everyone knows about Google’s “Street view,” the awesome Google application that lets you cruise city streets without leaving your computer screen.

Google is now expanding their street views to include interior photography of the businesses seen along the way. We’re happy that Google has chosen Capitol Hill Books as one of the first businesses in Denver to be photographed for this new project. Today, the Google photographer came into the store to take a look around and use her state-of-the-art 360 degree camera to show what it is like walking through our store (She was a quite nice person as well and the Google people were really great and communicative about the project to us.).

Eventually, Google will link the photographs to the street views of our store. So when you see our store on Google Street View, you’ll be able to click to see pictures of our store from the inside as well. We’re very excited about this project and we’ll be sure to update you about when the photography and content will be available online.

But why did Google choose our store? Well our prominent location for sure, but also because of our above average number of Google searches for our store that actually led people to our site. Our own internal statistics show more than 35,000 hits since we upgraded this site a year ago.

So on the one year anniversary of our new, improved Capitolhillbooks.com (additional props to former employee, Tom for originally putting this site together), we just want to thank our customers for continuing to use the website. We continue to improve because of them.