Category: Libraries & Bookshops

  • Heffers Bookshop, Cambridge

    I heard of this bookshop years ago, particularly its amazing children’s section but it was only last week that I actually visited. It is large with a wide frontage declaring that it is now owned by Blackwells but seemingly being allowed to keep its own character, built up over the last 150 years. We went […]

  • Vending machines

    I can’t remember the last time I used a vending machine. The joy of coffee flavoured powder and tepid water or the packet of crisps that you paid for but then gets stuck and requires you to kick the machine. However, if I lived near Exeter railway station then all would be different because they […]

  • Quirky places to buy books

    In the small town of Chesham is a community bookshop; a euphemism I suppose for second hand bookshop. The walls are painted a deep yellow and all the furniture: dressers, shelves and sideboards are painted grey. It looks quite classy and the whole place gives off an atmosphere of being loved and really cared for. […]

  • Keep calm and carry on

    Everybody has heard this catch phrase which has been used, abused, modified and satirised for years. How many years? Well since 2000 actually, when the owner of a second hand bookshop in Northumberland found a World War 2 poster in a box of books he had bought at auction. He displayed it in his shop, […]

  • Here is a good day out in East Sussex

    In the small town of Alfriston, or maybe it’s a large village, is a gem of a bookshop called Much Ado About Books. And, there really is much ado, this is not a straightforward bookshop. The building was a house, so it is a series of small rooms, an interesting staircase and a back garden. […]

  • Persephone Books

    A lovely bookshop that I haven’t visited! Before the pandemic and the lockdowns I was working out a bookshop walk in London. There was going to be time for a walk in the park and several vital stops for coffee and pastries and maybe even tea and cake. There were plenty of quite historic bookshops […]

  • Phone box libraries

    When I was in a tiny village in Somerset I saw a telephone box neatly shelved and full of books; a mini library. Looking this up I found there were many of them, using de-commissioned red telephone boxes. The first one was apparently opened in 2009 in Westbury sub-Mendip in Somerset and was purchased by […]

  • Hatchards

    The oldest bookshop in the country is in a tall, five storey building at 187 Piccadilly. Hatchards was opened by John Hatchard, a publisher and anti- slavery campaigner in 1797. It remains in the same building to this day and is an inviting place in which to browse. Age, heritage and time past are in […]

  • The British Library

    The British Library is a wonder. It contains the Magna Carta and handwritten lyrics of Beatles songs as well as everything else in between and it is free. As a child I remember it being part of the British Museum. I recall going there to see the Egyptian mummies and being bowled over by the […]

  • 170 something years on

    From history lessons I knew all about the 1815 Corn Laws and the1832 Reform Act but The Libraries Act of 1850 obviously passed me by. It gave boroughs the power and indeed the responsibility to establish free libraries giving access to literature and information to all. It should be understood that this was not something that […]