I discovered Lin Carter’s Callisto series in the discount racks on the sidewalk at Capitol Hill Books.

I know Denver as the Mile High City mainly because of Mile High Comics, which supplied my comic book fix in the eighties when I moved back from a college town with real comic book stores to a small town with just a drug store and a grocery store. Their subscription club kept me in comics and magazines while I figured out what to do with my life, and, later, recovered from an automobile accident.

Of course, most people who think “books” and “Denver” think Tattered Cover. That’s where everyone goes when they’re in Denver. Writers and agents and bloggers rave about it. I’m not going to review it because it is definitively not a “bookstore less traveled”. It’s a fine store, especially if you’re looking for new books. But if you’re a book hound, you should know that there are more bookstores in Denver than TC.

Two that I enjoyed on a leisurely walk through downtown were Capitol Hill Books and Kilgore Books & Comics. These two bookstores are only about fourteen blocks away from each other—about a ten minute walk. And they’re only a thirty-minute walk from Tattered Cover. Both of them had great science fiction books when I was there. Out of those two bookstores, I found six of the books on my list including four of the Ballantine Best Of Science Fiction series.

I picked up The Anubis Gates, a great Tim Powers book, in Kilgore. And I picked up Advise & Consent, a weird senatorial procedural by Allen Drury that started me on an Allen Drury kick, at, appropriately enough, Capitol Hill.

Of course Kilgore has comics, too. And if you make the trek out to them, there’s also a good record store, Wax Trax, right next to Kilgore. I found some nice Arlo Guthrie and Allan Sherman there, as well as some things I’d never heard of before but which were priced reasonably enough to take a chance.

And as long as you’re in the area, you might also check out the Denver Botanic Gardens. Besides being a great place to wander they have a decent, for an annex, used bookstore on site. I picked up a “James Tiptree, Jr.^•” book, Up The Walls of the World^•, for fifty cents.

The Denver Botanic Gardens are a very relaxing place to sit and read the books you bought at the Denver Botanic Gardens.