31 places in London to buy second-hand books
31 places in London to buy second-hand books
A guide to independent second-hand booksellers
Hello and welcome to Wooden City, a newsletter about London.
If you haven’t come here via @caffs_not_cafes, I'm a writer called Isaac Rangaswami and this is my Substack.
Every other week I publish an article about everyday places in London with unusual staying power, like shops, buildings, restaurants and public spaces.
In case you missed it, here’s parts one, two and three of my citywide caffs guide.
My dad never forced me to read, he just tricked me into it, by filling our house with old books and taking me to places that sold them. Those shops are among my earliest high street memories – still, musty rooms lined with yellow-brown cuboids that once belonged to other people.
Now that I’m older, I realise second-hand bookshops interest me for the same reason that old caffs do. They’re cheap, atmospheric and designed with people in mind. There’s also fewer of them than there used to be, so the ones that remain have become more important.
They’re a funny kind of business too, whose owners rarely set out to make money, nor do they have much scope to. It’s as if they sell books because some kind of strange impulse has compelled them to: the same impulse that made them book collectors themselves, and now compels them to make books easier for others to buy. If you spend enough time in places like this, accumulating books seems like a perfectly normal thing to do.
After going to a lot of second-hand bookshops lately, I’m convinced that London has more of them than people might imagine. It’s true that Charing Cross Road isn’t what it used to be. And a number of neighbourhoods, especially those in some outer London boroughs and those east of the River Lea, have very few independent bookshops at all. But if you wrote down London’s famous second-hand booksellers, and added some lesser-known ones too, that list would take you a week to work through. I know this because I’ve now done exactly that.
Purely to give myself some constraints, I have excluded Oxfam Bookshops, but that’s not to say I don’t like them. This list also has less of an emphasis on rare, antiquarian and art booksellers, a few considered exceptions aside. Overall, my goal has been to produce something more comprehensive than other second-hand bookshop guides I’ve come across, while also trying to capture each place’s personality.
I also just wanted to get to know these places better myself, so as with the caffs guide, this list is really a collection of rooms that have stayed with me. It doesn’t claim to be definitive, and I’d honestly love to hear about the places that I’ve missed, because I plan to do a follow-up at some point, as well as a separate guide devoted to independent bookshops that only sell new books, which I think are very valuable too.
Central London
Any Amount of Books
One of those places that grabs you by the collar and drags you inside, packed with floor-to-ceiling shelves and no less than 20,000 books. It’s here you’ll find one of London’s best book basements, the perfect hideaway from the West End hellscape outside. Any Amount of Books has been operating in its current form since the 1980s, but this building’s bookselling history goes back 100 years.
56 Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0QA
Skoob Books
Skoob is actually a kind of submarine, with exposed pipes, burgundy pink carpets and clustered bookshelves that engulf you like little cabins. I recently opened a book here and a train ticket to Wakefield from 1989 fell out. Skoob’s been around for longer than that, in various forms, but its studenty energy has kept it young. I am full of respect for its crazy, palindromic name.
66 The Brunswick, Off Marchmont St, London WC1N 1AE
Judd Books
A perfect one-two punch with Skoob, Judd Books is more straightforward than its neighbour beneath the Brunswick Centre. What really gets me about the place is its dignified sign, with its weighty, drop-shadowed letters, that announce clearly and distinctly what Judd is all about: “BOOKS”.
82 Marchmont St, London WC1N 1AG
Archive Bookstore
Archive Bookstore is something out of Withnail and I – an eccentric, tumbledown spot that reminds you second-hand bookshops are really just rooms overloaded with stuff. A “no entry” sign hangs in one dark corner; in another a sunken area is cordoned off by a plank of wood that says, “please remove and replace”, to stop people falling in. When I went to pay, I couldn’t help but ask the proprietor how his shop had survived, in Marylebone of all places. “It’s a fair question,” he said.
83 Bell St, London NW1 6TB
Tenderbooks
Tenderbooks looks like a characterful bookshop on a characterful street, but it’s actually way cooler than that. It mostly sells new and often fascinatingly left-field books on things like art, design and architecture, with a table of curated second-hand stuff on the same topics downstairs. A shop this weird has absolutely no business being in WC2, and I’m thrilled it exists.
6 Cecil Ct, London WC2N 4HE
North London
Housmans Bookshop