Decent bookshops thread

Since Waterstones is bullshit (see ), let's recommend each other good bookshops from places we lived.

I'll start,

Topping and Company, Bath, UK

Huge selection, no celebrity shit, all customers offered complementary tea or coffee while browsing.

Other urls found in this thread:

octoberbooks.org/jobs/
twitter.com/winchester_book
antikvarijat-biblos.hr/
antikvarijatzz.hr/
antikvarijat-bono.com/
antikvarijat-brala.hr/
antikvarijat-studio.hr/
aukcije.hr/
jesenski-turk.hr/
thelondonbookshopmap.org/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

City Lights in San Fransisco is Godly

October Books, Southampton, UK

Small collectivist bookseller. Fiction section not great, but decent philosophy and criticism selection. Stocks a variety of leftist magazines.

Malvern Books in Austin, TX is really good. Small but with an excellent selection and helpful/knowledgeable staff.

...

When I went there it seemed good, but also was pretty busy with people who were obviously there because it's a 'famous bookshop'. Actually, that's why I was there too. I think I bought Portnoy's Complaint there.

The Strand, New York, is a meme bookstore also, but less touristy imho

Nijmegen, the Netherlands:
Dekker v/d Vegt: good, middle-of-the-road bookshop, has some meme-tier shit, but also a great secondhand section in the back of the store

Boekhandel Roelants: lots of books on philosophy, has a basement with cheap books

The London Review Bookshop, Bloomsbury, London, UK

It's run by the LRB. 'nuff said.

I didn't even know it was a famous place until I went there, my cousin just texted me and told me I should go when he heard I was in San Fran. Really great selection.

There's pretty much only Indigo and Chapters in Toronto and they're both overpriced. The Chapters by Kennedy Commons is the best though, it's absolutely massive. It's like walking into a museum of books, I could walk around that place all day.

There's also a few smaller stores that sell cheap used books, but my favourite are the vendors who sell cheap books on the street in the summer. You can see them on Bloor St. between St. George and Spadina.

There's a used book store on Yonge St. between Wellsely and Bloor which isn't too bad. But the most obvious bookstore which shouldn't be a secret to anyone are the UofT bookstore which honestly has a great selection of texts. Even though they're meant for the course, professors tend to order books which aren't widely in print and no one really checks to see if you're buying books for your course or not.

Along with this is the discounted unofficial bookstore just across from the UofT bookstore which isn't fun to browse, but if you call ahead and ask for a book you're looking for, you can usually get a better deal.

Finally there's the other bookstore underneath the Krishna Copiers, but again it's not fun to browse. However it does have good manuals and a lot of local small publishers if that's your thing. I bought a little book called "The Canadian Writers Handbook" from there which I still use to this day.

That's really all there is to Toronto. There are a lot of small specialty stores which deal with local and small publishers but Toronto also has an excellent library city and many of our libraries were also renovated quite decently in the past decade. I think nowadays I prefer to read ebooks and if I must, I'll check out a book from the library. If there's a new book I want it's much easier to pirate it than to drop $20 + tax for the initial hardcover. Bottom line is, books are just too expensive in TO.

Just saying, if you come to Venice don't go to the Acqua Alta bookstore, unless you're one of those fucks who gets his kicks by seeing a gondola with a couple of cats on it smacked in the middle of the fucking place, surrounded by rotting, unopenable books. Go to Marco Polo instead.

Anyone knows good shops in Gent?

wow, October books. i used to go in there a lot, years ago.
it was more of a hardcore marxist bookshop in those days (hence the name). they had to go a bit more mainstream to survive.

i pretty much always buy something in the winchester oxfam book shop when i go in there. i only pass by occasionally though.

Fuck me if I didn't forget about BMV books. near Spadina and Bloor. BMV along with the Paperback Exchange (near the Scarborough General Hospital) are every poor student's dream.

i really liked the bookshop in a converted church when i was in maastricht recently

it's a shame i can't read much dutch really

They're actually in danger of closing down again now: the current owners don't want to run it any more, so they're trying to find a group of people to take it over.
octoberbooks.org/jobs/

Anyone from Zagreb? I can dump my list of used book stores if you want it.

If anyone lives in the Kitchener Waterloo ON area: Firstly hmu, secondly, old Goat book shop on king is pretty...well GOAT

i-i can teach you

Best place(s) in Newcastle UK? Just moved up here

Symposia bookshop in Hoboken NJ!

>tfw in Peru
>no decent bookstores
>only bookstores are inside malls and carry mostly YA
>few paperbacks of decent books cost the same as its hardcover counterpart in the US
>Only used books stores treat their books like a vegetable on a farmers market (piling everything on top of everything else)
>Also, due to humidity here (82%) used books are full of fungus and I can't read them without my eyes getting red and getting rashes on my arms
>Only way of getting books is importing them by ebay or amazon or abebooks
>tfw can only afford to buy books twice a year.

Fine, I buy like 30 pounds of books at once, but still. Expensive as fuck.

What are you doing? Get a kindle.

I have a Kindle. I mean for collecting books.

Tennesseebros can agree: McKay's is the shit.

Also, Half Priced Books is honestly pretty fucking great. I picked up a stack of hardcovers from DeLillo, Pynchon, and others for less that $10 each.

What about El Virrey Bookstore in Lima?

Southampton calling in too.

Have you been to the Oxfam bookshop on London Road? It's incredible. The selection is marginally better than October Books and everything is dirt cheap.

Lo mismo. . Igual que comunitas o crisol. En general el problema es que busco solo tapaduras y aca por el precio y peso pocas librerias los tienen.

I've been to Winchester once and happened upon a really cramped but cool bookshop down some random alley. It had three storeys, each consisting of a tiny room with books stacked from floor to ceiling (could probably only fit 5 people in there at one time). Do you happen to know the name?

Pic related is the outside but I can't find any of the inside.

I'm not a fan of the flagship one. It's enormous, but it's filled with shit. They don't separate literature from fiction, so you're forced to wade through entire bookcases full of Dan Brown, Jodi Picoult, Nicholas Sparks, etc. Their choice of classics publisher is Wordsworth, which is shit tier, and they don't seem to differentiate between new and used books when pricing them. So if what you want is a falling-apart paperback, it'll still be "half price" at $9.

The one closer to me is nice though. Smaller, often rotating selection which isn't inundated with garbage.

Book Depository has free international shipping.

I'm moving to boston for a new job, does anybody have recs for this area?

Rizzoli in New York is god tier. They had an old shop on 57th street but it got demolished to make room for one of those new bland skyscrapers exclusive to 57th. The new one is by the Flatiron and it's not quite as hot but still decently hot in its own right

London recommended bookshop ?
I know only Foyles

Bookdepository hides the shipping price in the price of the books. Depending on where you live you can pay way more yet still think you got a deal because.
>MUH free shipping

Until recently could exploit this system by using proxy's.

I'm in town until thursday; may check out that big Chapters tomorrow. So far I tried a few used book stores: Zoinks (mostly fiction, still not a big selection, inventory is half vinyl), Balfour (pretty standard used book store selection, better art/drama/philosophy section than most) and monkey's paw (curiosities rather than standard used books; wouldn't count on ever finding something specific, but pic related in the back is pretty cool).

Had a blind hope of stumbling into a large selection of well maintained used Loebs at a decent price. No luck so far.

Oh yeah, I jknow that one. It's just called the Winchester Bookshop.
They have a twitter:
twitter.com/winchester_book

It seemed pretty nice when I went in, but it's the kind of place that seems to be just barely surviving on the margins. I felt pretty guilty when I browsed for 30 minutes but didn't buy anything.

Yeah that's a good bookshop. I'm somewhat wary about shopping there because I read an article a few years back that said that charity bookshops are crowding out the few remaining independent booksellers. I'll probably still pop in if I'm nearby though.

...

You are dutch? Thanks for recommend dude, I only know English Book Store in Amsterdam.

Gonna check the one you recommend

I live right next to this. Just down the road from here was a second hand bookshop, it's now a bookshop and a pub in one, I really want to go in but it's full of filthy hipster types

Southampton too. I love the oxfam bookshop. Have you tried the bookshop/pub on Portswood road, near the hobbit?

i went to Gent, assuming you mean Gent in Belgium. Now I don't remember the name of the bookstore, but there was a great one by the river specialised in English lit. Maybe if you google English bookstore Gent you might find it.

The bookshop alehouse? I already went in and tried it. The bookselling thing is just a gimmick. Poor selection, really it's decoration. Their beer selection isn't as good as it could be either. The Butcher's Hook in Bitterne is much better.

The old Peter Rhodes bookshop was great though. And their coffee was good.

Any good ones in Tokyo?

Chapters/Indigo/Coles are the most expensive and not necessarily the best selection but online selection and prices are both better

BMV has good prices for a wide variety of books at three locations

Ten Editions has a good stock of slightly more off-beat authors, I bought all my John Hawkes there as well as several Harvard Classics hardcovers

Robarts library has a cute little nook that sells old books for cash for cheap. Difficult to navigate because they put rows of books in front of other rows of books, but some good stuff sometimes.

I also like Book City because it's slightly cheaper than Chapters

But most importantly, Amazon is the cheapest seller of new books by far, and if you're a student you get free 2-day shipping and 10% of some books.

Oh, and then there's bookoutlet.com, but please please please mum's the words about that

u from bath m8? me 2

i live in bath U.K and tried to get a job here once

this is mad how many of us are there in this thread

Politics & Prose in Washington, DC.

Can someone rec some good used bookshops in Philadelphia?

Last word is the best I've been to so far.

Same with this place in Victoria, good vintage collection downstairs though.

swear i did a captcha with this in it

Anyone know good ones in Glasgow? I've only looked in charity shops

Oxfam shops have some great stuff, I work in one and I have to restrain myself from buying too much

yeah i'd never have thought

I would appreciate this if you're still here. I'm in Zagreb now and then.

Green Apple and Borderlands in San Francisco are great. City Lights is fine, and is basically the only decent selection of new books not in the burbs.

antikvarijat-biblos.hr/
antikvarijatzz.hr/
antikvarijat-bono.com/
antikvarijat-brala.hr/
antikvarijat-studio.hr/
I naravno, njuškalo. Inače, mislim da ti svi ovi mogu poslati knjige poštom ili Tiskom na tvoju adresu i ako nisi u Zagrebu.

anything in Miami?

ib4
>booksnbooks
>barnesnnoble
>bookstore at the grove

I used to hit up thrift stores but theyve been dry for a while.

We should have threads like this more often. I'll post a few from places I know.

Edinburgh has a bunch of bookshops at the 'pubic triangle' (between the three strip clubs) on Main Point / West Port. Edinburgh Books has the best atmosphere and probably the best selection, including quite a lot of history and a room dedicated to sheet music. Armchair Books has the best prices (and also a great selection). Peter Bell books is good but it's never open. There's also a foreign language specialist that seems to sell mostly translations of a single sci-fi author - strange place.

Elsewhere in the city, there's an Oxfam in Morningside which is usually pretty decent, especially for nice editions of classics. Old Town Bookshop (Victoria St.) is a lovely shop, but I've never found anything worth buying there apart from maps and prints - might be good if you're looking for books on art, though. Southside Books (South Bridge) has a great selection of foreign language lit, but the prices aren't great for second hand books.
Word Power Books (West Nicolson St., near the uni) is the lefty 'activist' bookshop. I've been generally impressed by their selection, but the books are all new and the prices are high. They're also insufferable twats, but I guess you expect that from a left-wing political bookshop.

Obviously London is full of bookshops. There's a London bookshop map which is worth tracking down. The best ones are generally along Charing Cross Road, especially Any Amount of Books for literature. Around the UCL campus there's Skoob Books (which is excellent for academic books, politics, philosophy, etc.) And nearby is Judd Books, my favourite, selling used academic books.

Eh, ove sam zaboravio...
aukcije.hr/ (slično njuškalu)
jesenski-turk.hr/

forgot link: thelondonbookshopmap.org/

It's been a while since I was in Cambridge and I think Galloway & Porter has shut, which was the legendary one. But I can recommend G. David Bookseller, hidden down an alley beside the church near the market square. There's another good bookshop at the other end of the alley, where it comes out onto King's Parade.

In Oxford, if you're looking for used / cheap books, ignore anyone raving about Blackwells (their second hand selection isn't great) and go straight for the Oxfams - one on St. Giles St. near the Ashmolean, one on Turl St. near the market. But the best shop I've found there is The Last Bookshop, New Inn Hall Street. Really cheap, good for academic books.

Yeah, meant that Gent. Thanks bruv, I'll try.

For Glasgow, I'd recommend Caledonia Books on Great Western Road and Thistle Books on Otago Street. Voltaire & Russeau isn't too bad either.

Vienna has some of my favourite bookshops, and there's no shortage of them. The biggest antiquarian bookshop is Bücher Ernst on Gumpendorfer Strasse - they have something like 40,000 books and you can browse the whole collection. Great stuff too, very friendly. There's a smaller branch on Dr. Karl Lueger Platz which is also excellent. From there it's a short walk to Antiquariat Schaden, just behind the old university, which has a more thorough selection of academic books. In the first district, I can also recommend Antiquariat Löcker on Annagasse - great for history and politics, very reasonably priced.

On Margaretenstrasse there are two good shops - Bücherwurm for antiquarian stuff, especially Austrian literature and history, and Anna Jeller for new books.

i've walked past that place many times but never gone in. somehow the BOOKS ---> sign outside puts me off. it reminds me of that old Far Side cartoon where the dog writes CAT FUD ----> on the side of the washing machine

The Book Exchange, Amsterdam in the red light district.

For a second hand store I think they are pricy, but then again I'm used to thrift shops.
Compared to Scheltema and de Slegte they are cheap.

And since they focus on English their collection is so much better.