Seattle's Used Bookstores: 1999 and 2019 is a collection of essays and photographs celebrating independent used bookstores in Seattle just before and twenty years after the city's tech boom. It is an homage to the culture of print and the world of used bookstores, reveling in their randomness, quantity of books, resident cats, patrons, and hard-working booksellers. Words and images convey the simple joy of reading, the magic of books, and the unique spaces created within bookstores.

Mary Brown grew up in Port Townsend, Washington, about two hours from Seattle on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula. She visited Seattle regularly during the 1980s and 1990s and graduated from the University of Washington in 2001. Mary currently lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the home of two used bookstores and Moravian Book Shop, said to be the oldest bookstore in America and among the oldest in the world.