Bookshops

Why do bookshops matter? How do they filter our ideas and literature?

Bookshops by Jorge Carrión is a vital manifesto for the future of the traditional bookshop, and a delight for all who love them.

In this inventive and highly entertaining book, Carrión takes his reader on a journey around the world, via its bookshops. His travels take him to Shakespeare & Co in Paris, Wells in Winchester, Green Apple Books in San Francisco, Librairie des Colonnes in Tangier, the Strand Book Store in New York and provoke encounters with thinkers, poets, dreamers, revolutionaries and readers.

Bookshops is the travelogue of a lucid and curious observer, filled with anecdotes and stories from the universe of writing, publishing and selling books. A bookshop in Carrión’s eyes never just a place for material transaction; it is a meeting place for people and their ideas, a setting for world changing encounters, a space that can transform lives.

Written in the midst of a worldwide recession, Bookshops examines the role of these spaces in today’s evershifting climate of globalisation, vanishing high streets, e-readers and Amazon. But far from taking a pessimistic view of the future of the physical bookshop, Carrión makes a compelling case for hope, underlining the importance of these places and the magic that can happen there.

Featured UK bookshops include Waterstones, Daunts, Foyles, Hatchards, Toppings, John Sandoe, Blackwell’s, P&G Wells, Goldsboro, and Stanfords