Rare and Used Book Store Opens

Jon Speed: The Book Scout has an inventory of 15,000 books

Jon Speed held its grand opening this week. The business hours are from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays.

Owner Jon Speed brings 20 years of antiquarian bookselling experience to the Syracuse literary scene, and the store’s fields of specialty are: literature, modern first editions, Americana and theology.  

The shop also has books on art, children’s books, cookbooks, mystery, science fiction, westerns, African-American interest, Native-American interest, general non-fiction and more.

Included in the stock are books signed by Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Buzz Aldrin, Sidney Poitier, Andre Gide, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Anais Nin and many others. There are books from the book collections of President Grover Cleveland and Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes fame). And there are antiquarian books such as a 1730s Foxes Book of Martyrs, a 1730s extra-illustrated Bible, an embroidered Psalm book from 1638 and an ancient Ge’ez codex that has been dated from the 12th-13th centuries.

Learn more at JonSpeedBooks.com.

— Staff report