Travel plans

Anyone have any bookshop-oriented travel plans to share with us?

I have a visit to Porto in Portugal this weekend to visit Libraria Lello, self-described as the most beautiful bookshop in the world. Somewhere on line I saw a warning that it's likely to be crowded with Potter-heads--JKR lived in Porto for a while. We'll see.

Prompted by an email offer from Qatar Airways, I logged into my frequent flier account and discovered that I had about 3x the number of miles I thought I had, so I spent some of them on a trip to Brussels so I can visit Boekhandel Dominicanen in Maastricht, which is in an old cathedral. This shop has apparently had a history of name changes, so you might find it referred to as Selexyz Dominicanen or Polare Dominicanen.

And finally, at the end of this month I have the opportunity to break a journey back from England to stop over in Bucharest and visit Cărtureşti Carusel (scroll down).

Why all this travel in the space of a month? I travel a lot anyway. But we are now in the holy month of Ramadan, when our office goes on short hours, and I can look after the domestic stuff during the afternoons rather than at the weekend.

Well, I’ve now been to Livraria Lello. It was indeed crowded, and most of the people in there seemed to be taking pictures rather than buying books. I took no pictures—there are plenty on the net anyway—but I did buy some books. For more details, see the exchange between bookmarque and me in this thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/304548#6816604. I suspect the crowding has a lot to do with the Potter connection, and there is a small display of Potter memorabilia at the back of the shop. This is bookstore tourism, I suppose, but not the kind I had in mind.

Never mind. Porto is a pretty town anyway, and like Barcelona, Stratford-on-Avon and Salzburg, is in a fair way of losing its soul to tourism.

This coming weekend is the trip to Maastricht to visit Boekhandel Dominicanen. Report on Saturday.

For better or worse I don't travel anymore. And I don't think I ever travelled specifically to go to a book store; but when I did travel I always made a point of finding out what bookstores (mostly used but new too) were in or near my destination and visiting as many as I could.

I suppose my peak was visiting Hay-on-Wye when I went to Wales in the late 1980s, but no one here needs to be told about Hay.

In the 1990s and early 2000s I visited some great bookstores in several eastern US towns, but I suspect that a number of those are no longer with us. Maybe this brief list will inspire someone to recount more recent visits to these places.

- Massachusetts Pioneer Valley - bookstores in Amherst, Northampton, South Hadley etc.
The Raven Bookshop, The Book Mill, and half a dozen more I can no longer name.

- Lancaster PA. - Winding Way Books and a handful of others

- Charlottesville VA - can't remember names.

- Bethesda MD - used to have 8 or so used and new bookstores in the 1990s, but they've all been chased by development. Even the once-predatory B&N is now gone.

- Don't forget Chicago and Pittsburgh, though I can no longer name shops.

Don't forget Chicago and Pittsburgh, though I can no longer name shops.

I can! At least for Chicago.

A couple of favorites:

Seminary Co-op Bookstore: http://www.librarything.com/venue/20/Seminary-Co-op-Bookstore, considered by many to be the best academic bookstore in the world. Here are a couple of my blog posts about the place: http://joansbooks.blogspot.com/search?q=seminary It also has the advantage of being next door to Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House. (P.S. I give tours there, so if you think of coming, let me know!) Seminary Co-op also runs an excellent general bookstore, 57th Street Books: http://www.librarything.com/venue/19/57th-Street-Books Definitely a great place if you have kids, because their childrens' book section is stupendous.

A few blocks down from 57th Street Books is Powell's: http://www.librarything.com/venue/354/Powells-Hyde-Park Used books, as well as a good stock of remainders. Because it's located near the University of Chicago, they have a good selection of academic books in various fields.

Made it to Boekhandel Dominicanen!

... and I have to say that it was a significantly pleasanter experience than Livraria Lello. However beautiful Livraria Lello is (and it really is beautiful, in an over-the-top kind of way), the crowding is a problem. Dominicanen is no more crowded than any other bookshop—just more beautiful than most. Also, there is a coffee shop at the back that does a decent snack lunch.

And, once again, of course I bought books! Details later.

>7 haydninvienna:

once again, of course I bought books!

Shock! ;-)

As I said, I made it to Boekhandel Dominicanen, the bookshop in an old Gothic church. The basic fabric of the church is still there—pillars, Gothic arches, the whole lot—but a steel structure has been built inside to give 2 upper floors. The English books, of which they have a reasonable range, are on the first floor. I’ll post some pictures because this shop isn’t as well represented on the net as Livraria Lello is.

I bought:
Absolutely on Music by Haruki Murakami with Seiji Ozawa
Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Praise of Folly by Erasmus.

I seem to be collecting Murakami’s non-novels. I have his book on running and the one about the gas attacks in the Tokyo subway (and have actually read both of them). The 2 Bradburys—as it happens, I don’t have either. And since I was in the Netherlands I thought I should buy something by a Dutchman.

Then back to Leuven and found the local branch of De Slegte, which I understand to be a chain. Here I bought:
The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey (pleasant to find a novel by a fellow countryman in a provincial city in Belgium)
And
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter.

Now I’m going down to the hotel restaurant to eat Belgian beef stew and drink Trappist beer.

>5 lilithcat: Just re-reading your post and clicked on the blog link. Your architecture critic is obviously an idiot. I'll swap any amount of charm for natural light when the "charm" is a "claustrophobic basement". For a bookstore basement done right, consider the Norrington Room at Blackwells in Oxford. This is local to me when I am back in England (although i'm staying out of Blackwells until I'm satisfied that they've shed any links with the UK Independence Party).

I would love to come to Chicago and visit both the Seminary bookstore and the Robie House, but visits to the US are impracticable at present.

>10 haydninvienna:

Should such a visit ever become practical, let me know! I love to play tour guide.

>11 lilithcat: Thanks, duly noted.

Next visit (after Bucharest next weekend) is Toronto at the end of June. I will be with my younger daughter, who doesn’t read (but who turns 21 on 1 July, and whose name is Laura—how cool is that?) so can’t be too big on bookstores. Does anyone have a must-visit shop in Toronto within easy public transport reach of Union Station?

Made it to Cărturești Carusel in Bucharest. It really is beautiful, and has a decent selection of books in English. (It also has a lot of stationery and souvenirs, which looked like good stuff, although I didn’t buy any of it.) God knows what the building was like as a bank, which apparently was what it was built for.

Anyway, I bought:
Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford
Good Omens by you know who
The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun by J R R Tolkien (huh? Never even heard of this!)
Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher, for the obligatory Romanian author, and
Literary Places by Sarah Baxter.

I’m now at breakfast, and the radio is playing a cover by some woman of “Walking in Memphis”. Can’t go upstairs for a few minutes yet ...

Re the reference to "Walking in Memphis" in #14: I meant the song by Marc Cohn, one of the all-time-greatest one hit wonders. It may be obvious that I like a lot of different music. I see from Wikipedia that Cher has covered the song, and it may have been her version that I was hearing.

Oh, my, I just found out about "Bed and Book".

https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2019/06/05/naples-first-book-hotel/

>16 lilithcat: Oh my indeed. Is the idea of "sleeping with the books" becoming a trend?

Not a bookstore but of course you know about Gladstone's library?

>17 haydninvienna:

Not a bookstore but of course you know about Gladstone's library?

I do, but have never had the pleasure.

It's nice to see a proliferation of book-oriented hotels/inns. Anyone would think people actually liked to read real books!

This is not exactly travel plans because it wasn't planned.

I was back in Bicester on Friday, and travelled back to Heathrow by train, necessarily passing through central London. Since I had some time in hand, I grabbed the opportunity of an unplanned visit to Hatchards, in Piccadilly, said to be the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom, founded in 1797 and trading at the same address since 1801. It appears in at least one of the lists of “most beautiful”, but unjustifiably in my opinion. Which is not to say it’s ugly, it just isn’t in the class of Boekhandel Dominicanen or Cărturești Carusel. Still, nice 18th century building, less conscious of itself than Livraria Lello, and well looked after. Interesting rather than beautiful, perhaps. Painting of Mr Hatchard on the stairs. The interior is rather like a high class Waterstones, which is what it is. The Hatchards group (there are 4 Hatchards shops in London), like Hodges Figgis in Dublin, is owned by Waterstones. Smaller than the Waterstones flagship 150 metres further down Piccadilly. I didn’t have much time so I got my wishlist up on the phone and went looking purposefully rather than just browsing. I found and bought:
Ice by Anna Kavan
and
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.

You may have noticed that for the past week I’ve been in Toronto and Ottawa with my younger daughter Laura. Laura isn’t a reader but she is tolerant of her father’s poking-around in bookshops. Also, it was her 21st birthday last Canada Day and she spent it in Canada. I thought that was pretty good.

Anyway, the trip was quite a book buying spree for me. The only part of it that would rate as bookstore tourism, though, was a little side trip to Daunt Books in Marylebone, which appears in one or two lists. I make the same comments about it as about Hatchards—nice oldish building, well looked after, good stock of interesting books and staff who know about them.

I vaguely promised some pics of Boekhandel Dominicanen and Cărturești Carusel. So here is Boekhandel Dominicanen:

Frontage:
Interior:and

including its coffee shop (with interesting table):

andand
and here is Cărturești Carusel:
and.

In another thread I said I was travelling to places where books were not sold, and earned a shocked face from 2wonderY. The first place I went was Academic Books in Helsinki, which has an interior designed by Alvar Aalto and is on a couple of the lists. My purchases there are listed at https://www.librarything.com/topic/309227#6879647. After Helsinki we were in Savonlinna for a couple of days. Nice town and it has a bookshop, but since I can’t read Finnish there wasn’t much there for me.

Now I’m in Broome. This is a small town on the north-west coast of Australia. It’s a port, a support base for the oil and gas industry, and a resort. And it has a small but pretty good bookshop. So, far, therefore, no place where books are not sold.

Next port of call is Sydney, where books most definitely are sold.

Library Tourism?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/travel/libraries-are-the-tourist-attractions....

Lonely Planet bookstore tourism

http://tinyurl.com/yys8tjme

>23 Crypto-Willobie: I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I live in Doha and have not yet been to the Qatar National Library. I must fix that. They allow borrowing too.

Less impressed with the Lonely Planet article--they don't really add much to the lists, do they? I'll give them props for not calling people who frequent bookshops "bookworms" though.

>23 Crypto-Willobie: When I was still knee-high to a grasshopper, the Library Theatre in the basement of the Johannesburg Public Library was the place to see the very best live performances aimed at children (and sometimes others). On an upper floor was the Africana Museum, which had, among other things, a Zeederberg stagecoach that had once been drawn by zebras. There was also a rare-books library with the memorable name of the "Strange Collection of Africana", one of the juiciest bits of which was two of W.J. Burchell's (as in Burchell's Zebra, Burchell's Coucal etc.) original sketchbooks. Sadly, the Africana Museum was moved out, rebranded as MuseumAfrica and allowed to degenerate into chaos. I don't know the fate of the Library Theatre or the Strange Collection.

I am a member of Clarity, one of the international plain language associations, and got an email from them about a breakfast in London on 21 September. Since the speaker is a former boss of my current boss, I decided to go, and it occurred to me that I could combine the trip to London with a side trip to Zwolle in the Netherlands to visit Waanders in de Broeren (website in Dutch), another bookshop in a church. So Amsterdam and then Zwolle on Friday and London on Saturday.

I made it to Waanders. Pics to come, but it's even more impressive though smaller than Dominicanen Boekhandel in Maastricht (I think so anyway). Reasonable selection of English books, although I had to wander around a good while before finding them. Details of what I bought (and my sales job for LT)here.

The only jarring note with Waanders was the cafe. Food reasonable, but service a bit iffy.

The pics as promised. Zwolle is a pretty nice looking town.

Canal around the old city:



The Museum of the Visual Arts (I didn't go in):



The exterior of Waanders (there's a kids' sand pit outside):



The organ (still there!)



and the interior of the shop facing away from the organ:

I'm running out of interesting bookshops. One I still have on the list is Leakey's Bookshop in Inverness (Scotland), which is yet another bookshop in an old church (and a highly regarded shop in general, it seems). A used book shop this time rather than a seller of new books.

"Interesting bookshop" for me is one that has historical or other interest and can be reached by air (perhaps in combination with surface transport) and returned from between 1700 Thursday and 0800 Sunday, Doha time, so basically in Europe, North Africa or the Middle East (excluding the UAE and Saudi Arabia). The trip to Leakey's involves a return flight to Edinburgh and a train trip from Edinburgh Gateway station, near the airport, to Inverness—which gets me a crossing of the Forth Bridge (woohoo!—I'm a bridge nerd as well).

I'm visiting Leakey's Bookshop this weekend. One minor point that's niggling at me is that, as I said above, the shop is in an old church. But which church? Everything on line seems to call it "an old Gaelic church", which I thought was basically meaningless. However, a bit of digging around on the net produced this: https://www.ambaile.org.uk/detail/en/20463/1/EN20463-old-high-church-and.htm, which actually refers to the building as "the old Gaelic Church". Given that it was apparently built in 1715 in the aftermath of the Jacobite uprising, as a place of worship for Gaelic-speaking soldiers, it's probably safe to assume that it was originally a place of worship of the established Church of Scotland. As far as I can tell, there was one and only one Church of Scotland in 1715, the First Secession happening in 1733. At some point the "old Gaelic Church" became a place of worship for one of the breakaway Presbyterian groups who considered the Church of Scotland to be insufficiently Reformed. The linked page mentions the Free Presbyterian Church and the Free Church of Scotland in the same paragraph. They are different: they are two of the breakaway groups, and both still exist.

The name still bothered me though. "Greyfriars"? The Grey Friars were the Friars Minor within the Franciscan Order. Of course Scotland was a Roman Catholic country until the Scottish Reformation, and the Franciscans were probably active there. There is a history of the Old High Church (the large church behind the shop) on line (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_A4H0VrUgZMOTQ0YjhiYzktYTQ4NC00ODJjLWI0NzctMjZjMmUwMzQ0OTUy/view) which mentions the Black Friars (that is, the Dominicans). Parts of the Old High Church go back to the 13th century.

>31 haydninvienna: Greyfriars in Edinburgh? It's a place name, though it was once a description.

>32 hfglen: Should have been clearer. Leakey's Bookshop is in Inverness, and the building it's in appears to be called Greyfriars Hall. Being a former Presbyterian child myself, I'm familiar with the custom of a Presbyterian church having a hall attached to serve as a place for social functions, but if this church was originally a church building I can't see where the Greyfriars bit came from. Unless there is in fact a connection with Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, which is a parish kirk of the Church of Scotland, built on the site of a pre-Reformation Franciscan establishment. The Wikipedia article on the Kirk notes that "The graveyard surrounding the church, Greyfriars Kirkyard, is in the hands of a separate trust, and is maintained by The City of Edinburgh Council. Numerous well-known people are buried in this graveyard .... For many, the graveyard is associated with Greyfriars Bobby, the loyal dog who guarded his master's grave. It is also the inspiration for many of the characters in the Harry Potter series. ". And of course the Elephant House Cafe, where JKR is supposed to have hung out, is just down the street.

Oh, and just a hop step and jump (or, given the number of pubs in the area, a drunken stagger) down the fetchingly named Candlemaker Row is Transreal Fiction, a fine SFF bookshop.

A place that haydninvienna may wish to visit one day. Almost 40 years ago Better Half and I had the privilege of visiting Italy, and our last stop was Milan. One of the last places we visited was a coffee-shop in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele; there was a bookstore across the passageway. And lo, they had a sale table at the door. And there was a English copy of Ada Boni's Italian Regional Cooking, which naturally joined us on our travels. Never mind the book, whose recipes work and whose illustrations are gorgeous if dated; don't even mind the bookstore. Richard, go enjoy the Galleria, one block from the Duomo in one direction and La Scala in the other!

>34 hfglen: Um, Hugh, I’ve actually been there! I agree it’s gorgeous although pricey. Did you note that there is a hotel in there? We stayed there on a visit to Milan to go to La Scala, which I was not enormously impressed with despite the stratospheric prices. And yes, I did walk out the other end to the Duomo.

Edited to remove an “o” from the city name, put there by autocorrect. The city’s name in English is Milan, not Milano.

And now I’ve been to Leakey’s. I liked it although the organisation is a bit like the aftermath of a hurricane. It’s impressively well stocked but it might be hard to find anything that you were specifically looking for. One of the shops just to wander round in and discover stuff, perhaps. Which is basically what I did. Prices generally seemed reasonable. See my general thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/309227) for what I bought.

I saw a discussion somewhere on LT recently comparing Leakey’s and Barter Books, to the advantage of the latter. Having now been to both, I want to continue to have both. Barter has much more room and doesn’t pack its stuff so tightly, and (I think) is more expensive generally. I think finding specific books would be easier at Barter, which seems to have several staff and devotes more effort to organising. But of course all that comes at a cost.

>35 haydninvienna: Didn't specifically note the hotel; we were in a different part of town, near the science museum, as I wanted to see the Da Vinci models. And got to see some elderly cars as well! Only saw La Scala from the street outside, but spent time in and on the roof of the Duomo.

Posted mainly to stop the group going dormant: a truly dire used-book stall at today's craft market at Inchanga Station.



Dire? They do tarot readings to make ends meet.

>38 hfglen: Yes, as I said above, I've just about run out of interesting bookshops that can be practicably visited. One possibility is Livraria Bertrand at Rua Garrett 73-75 in Lisbon, which is supposed to be the oldest bookshop in Europe (operating at that address since 1732). Or maybe I should go back to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, except that if I go to Milan without DW she will kill me.

A complication for me is that the places within range are mostly in Europe. Naturally, most bookshops on the continent of Europe deal mainly or entirely in books in languages other than English. I'd like to find a reliable list of bookshops in Europe outside the Anglosphere that stock English-language books. Web searches tend to find the same ones over and over again, and too often they have closed (a list more than about five years old may be pretty well useless).

I'm going to count my mall crawl yesterday as a piece of bookstore tourism.

Doha might be described as a cluster of shopping malls flying in loose formation. There must be a couple of dozen of them, and I get lost in them quite reliably. Doha has few bookshops, and even the establishments that call themselves bookshops tend to stock mainly toys and games. And of course, understandably, a lot of the books are Arabic.

Doha also has a spiffy new metro system, which is fast, clean and ridiculously cheap. So since I had a free day yesterday, I decided to ride the metro to as many shopping malls as possible. I rode almost the full length of all 3 metro lines for the grand sum of 6 Qatari riyals (about £1.25 or $1.60).

At the Mall of Qatar, the newest of the 3 malls I visited, I found the Aafaq Bookstore. Small, and the stock gave something of a feel of having been selected at random, but I found and bought Mycroft Holmes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse, and The Value of Everything by Maria Mazzucato. In bookshops here, I tend to snap up anything that looks decent just to encourage them to keep on stocking the good stuff. The Mall of Qatar also has a Virgin Megastore. Although the chain is defunct in Europe and the US, there are still Virgin Megastore branded franchises elsewhere. Here I found It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook. Goodness knows we could do with some reasons to be hopeful.

Then on to Festival City. This has a Borders store, and as with the Virgin Megastores there are still Borders franchises in Asia. However, as a bookshop this one is a let-down. Nothing worth buying here.

The last one was Villaggio Mall. (Yes, really.) By this time it was getting late and I'd had enough shopping malls, so called it a day.

Another bit of travel that included a bookshop. I was going to a concert in Metz in France and stayed overnight in Luxembourg, where I'd never been before, because it had the nearest major airport. Two comments: If you can squeeze Luxembourg into your trip to Europe, do so, it's beautiful if small; and it has an English language bookshop, the Ernster All English Bookshop. Small but interesting stock. I bought:
• A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable by Brian Clegg
• Shelf Life: Writers on Books and Reading by Alex Johnson
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein.

I just looked over the list of notable Luxembourgeois in Wikipedia, and one name leapt out: Hugo Gernsback. Yes, that Hugo Gernsback.

-pilgrim- tells the denizens of the Green Dragon of this place:

http://forreadingaddicts.co.uk/bookshop-reviews/wild-rumpus-minneapolis-mn

Wish I could go there!

>43 hfglen: I was actually going to add that link, but you did it for me. Thanks to both you and -pilgrim-.

Our local online newspaper chain offers this list of delicious bookstores to visit:

https://www.iol.co.za/travel/world/europe/bibliophiles-will-delight-in-londons-a...

Great, as borders are closed and there are no overseas flights right now ...

>45 hfglen: I'm pleased to see that the deadline says "bibliophiles" rather than "bookworms". I really, really despise "bookworm".

I've been in 4 out of the 9, and I'm pretty sure that sakerfalcon in particular frequents at least one of the others.

*bump*

>47 hfglen: Thanks for that, Hugh. The PM is supposed to be making an announcement about easing local travel restrictions, and Mrs H has spoken vaguely of maybe going to Hay on Wye, so perhaps there’s hope.

No travel plans for this one, but: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mosul-iraq-bookstore.

Next time I'm in London: the Osterley Bookshop. The article john5918 linked to doesn't seem to give an address, but Google Maps shows it at 168a Thornbury Road.

Only just discovered this thread via a recommendation in the LibraryThing Railroad group - thanks haydninvienna

>1 haydninvienna: Wish I'd discovered it earlier as my better half and I were in Porto later in 2019 when we walked the Portuguese Camino.

>38 hfglen: Is that Inchanga in KwaZulu-Natal? I've been to one or two book fairs in South Africa after I was asked to come and give an opinion on the railway books in a deceased person's huge collection which were being disposed of, and through that I met one or two booksellers and collectors. I think I still have a couple of those books on my shelves.

>48 haydninvienna: Hay on Wye has some great bookshops. I used to go there often when I lived near Ross on Wye for a year back in 1995. Also passed through once on foot while walking a stretch of Offa's Dyke.

I don't know of any really interesting bookshops in my own neck of the woods, East Africa. There used to be some lovely old bookshops on Mama Ngina Street in central Nairobi, and I got a first edition of volume 2 of the official history of railways in East Africa there twenty-odd years ago, but they've all gone now. Best bookshop in Nairobi is Book Stop, run by two elderly Kenyan Indians, upstairs in the Yaya Centre. It's a modern shop where you can get a wide variety of books about Africa. They used to do second hand books but have run that part of the business down to almost nothing now.

>51 John5918: I've been to Hay on Wye a couple of times, and the other two UK Book Towns too—Wigtown in Scotland and Sedbergh in Cumbria. One thing they have in common (other than books) is that all 3 used to have railway stations, but none does now.

And a friend has just drawn my attention to another bookshop in a disused railway station, this one at Alnwick in Northumberland, England - Barter Books

The shop has many extra features: open fires in the Winter, beloved by all. The Station Buffet with good plain food, coffee, tea and cookies. Plus Paradise, the new ice cream parlour. A model railway acting as a link between the book columns of the central room, along with poetry lines...

Interestingly this is the bookshop where they found an original copy of the "Keep calm and carry on" World War II propaganda poster which was never officially issued and was lost for half a century.

>53 John5918: Been there! Don't miss the Alnwick Poison Garden nearby.

>51 John5918: Indeed it is. But the stock in this shelter is poor. Ike's Bookshop in town (Durban) has a much better selection.

bump