A celebration of bookshops/bookstores all over the world, featuring profiles of specific new and used bookstores, random snippets of interesting bookish facts, bits of interviews with booksellers, and short pieces from a variety of authors talking about their favorite bookshops, their dream bookshops, and the bookshops that shaped their lives.

Actually, I say "all over the world," but that's a little bit misleading, as the book really doesn't make much of an attempt to be equally inclusive of bookstores from all over. By far the largest and most detailed section is on bookshops in the UK, where this volume was published, and which the author clearly has far and away the most personal knowledge of. Most parts of the non-English-speaking world, by contrast, have only a few shops featured, with just a paragraph or two supplying some interesting facts about them. So those expecting something truly exhaustive and international, as opposed to something a bit more scattershot and personal, might find themselves disappointed. Fortunately, I didn't have any strong expectations one way or another, and I like scattershot and personal just fine.

You absolutely do have to be someone with bookstores in your soul to properly enjoy it, though. I mean, there's not huge amounts of substance here, and I suspect anyone else is likely to get bored pretty quickly of yet another description of bookshop decor or yet another earnest declaration about the satisfaction of holding real paper books. But I think it's safe to say there are a lot of us here on LT who do qualify as the right audience for this sort of thing. And I know it made me feel dreamily excited to imagine myself walking among all those varied shelves, and nostalgic for every bookstore I've ever been inside, and pleasantly itchy with the desire to go find some overstuffed secondhand bookshop to explore right now. Ah, I can almost smell the ink and paper... And it doesn't take any more than that to make me happy, really. ( )

Profiles some interesting bookstores, but completely shortchanges a lot of others. ( )

In this book, Jen Campbell travels the world, visiting different independant bookshops & then writing about them. If travel ever becomes more environmentally friendly/ sustainable (& the next pandemic isn't around the corner) I'm going to do a world bookshop tour & this book will be my travel guide!

This book is an ode to bookshops everywhere. Broken down by continent there's a small bit about interesting, famous, or extraordinarily unique bookshops all over the world. Interspersed throughout are short essays written by authors about their love of reading and the importance of bookshops, including some of their favourites. Sprinkled here and there are interesting facts related to books.

I started out adoring this book and by the end, liking it a lot. It was easy for me to adore it right off the bat as she starts the book in Wigtown, Scotland, wends her way through England and ends up in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. I didn't know about Wigtown but I've had a burning desire to go to Hay-on-Wye since I first heard about it (I thought it was a fantasy: a town made up by an author - then a Welsh friend of mine told me it was indeed a very real place). Now, I have to go to both.

The book petered out for me a tiny bit after she left the UK, because while it was obvious she spent time at quite a few of the places in the UK, it's equally obvious that she didn't spend time at most of the places in North America, or the rest of the continents. In fact, the further east the book traveled, the shorter the entries for the bookshops (some, I'm convinced, were just quick paragraphs emailed to her by the bookshops themselves). But there are still some great stories to be found - one or two even teared me up, and the book curse had me laughing.

There are two signatures worth of colour photos of the bookshops inserted at 1/3 and 2/3's of the way through; I'd have liked it better if they'd been properly paired with their respective bookshop entries, and I'd have loved to have seen more of them. It would have bumped this book up into the category/price point of a coffee-table style book, but I think it would have worked even better.

It's a great little book and it succeeds at celebrating the importance of the independent bookstores all over the world. I have dreams and schemes of bookshop-tour holidays and opening my own, perfect bookshop now more than ever and I hope the success of these bookshops are a sign of things to come.


[PopSugar 2015 Challenge (provisional): Book that made you cry.]

An ode to bookshops all over the world.



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