We live in the age of Amazon and with the huge discounts they are able to offer on new books, it is very hard to resist. For secondhand books, Abebooks is also an excellent and worldwide source, bringing the buyer in touch with so many booksellers that it is rare not to find what you are looking for. Prices can, however, often be high and shipping rates too. AbeBooks is also owned by Amazon.

Nothing quite beats browsing in a good bookshop, however, and finding there titles you didn’t know existed. The big chains have their place and some of their branches are really very good to visit and browse. Favourites are, however, good independents and, above all, secondhand dealers with reasonable prices and especially certain charity shops. Here are some of my regular favourites that are either great to pass an hour or so in or that are very difficult to leave without a few purchases.

Secondhand

Books for Amnesty, Gloucester Road, Bristol (also a branch in King Street, Hammersmith, London) – An absolute gem. Huge, well-ordered stock and excellent prices. Foreign language and sheet music in the basement is always a good hunting ground for me.

Oxfam Bookshops Branches can vary in quality of stock and price. We always enjoy visiting these branches in particular:

Half Moon Lane, Herne Hill, London – superb shop with a great turnover of stock.

Balham High Road, Balham, London – very good, interesting selection.

Clifton Village, Bristol – often some good finds.

South Street, Exeter, Devon – good, varied stock.

Woodstock Road, Oxford – perhaps not what it once was and prices seem to have crept up, but a good shop for student offloads.

British Red Cross bookshop, Bath Road, Cheltenham – excellent prices and varied stock.

British Heart Foundation Books and Music, Streatham High Road, London – good prices and always interesting stock.

Independents

London Review of Books Shop, Bury Place, London – just down from the British Museum, this is a truly excellent shop where you are very likely to find new titles of interest. Café attached. ☕️

Aldeburgh Bookshop, High Street, Aldeburgh, Suffolk – great bookshop.

Daunt Books, Marylebone High Street, London – lovely atmosphere and decor in this bookshop specialising in travel books.

Chain shops

Blackwells, Broad Street, Oxford – used to love their foreign language section and run up far too much debt on account as a result, but it’s a faint shadow of what it was. Still a great bookshop, however, with a vast and varied stock. Sheet music now part of the main shop.

Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London – a big refurbishment transformed the old, rather austere shop where you had to queue twice to buy a book. Now it plushly extends over numerous bright and airy floors with no bare tiled stairways or rickety lifts. Grant and Cutler occupies one floor; the foreign language booksellers that I first visited with my reading list in a shop piled high with excitingly foreign and unexplored tomes in a side street near Charing Cross station.

Now a branch of Waterstones at Torrington Place, London, but when I first knew it as a student it was Dillons. Still an interesting, rambling shop. Particularly good for Classics.

Heffers and the CUP shop in Cambridge and the OUP shop in Oxford are all worth a detour.