Why I Always Visit Bookshops When I Travel

In almost every city I visit, I end up in a bookshop before I properly know where anything else is. Before museums. Before landmarks. Sometimes before I’ve even unpacked my bag.

There’s usually a moment, somewhere between arriving and belonging, when a city still feels slightly unreal. The streets haven’t formed a pattern yet. The language sounds unfamiliar around you. Google Maps becomes a kind of temporary compass. Everything feels observed from the outside.

And then I walk into a bookstore and the pace changes almost immediately.

Outside, the city continues in motion: trams rattle past rain-streaked windows, scooters weave through traffic, people rush by with purpose. Inside, time softens. Conversations lower into murmurs. Pages turn quietly. People linger without explanation.

For a while, you’re no longer simply passing through a place. You’re inhabiting it.

That’s why I always visit bookshops when I travel. Not just because I love books, but because bookstores make cities feel briefly livable.

Bookshops Tell You What a City Cares About

You can learn a surprising amount about a place from its shelves.

In some cities, entire tables are devoted to philosophy and political essays. In others, there are sprawling sections dedicated to poetry, architecture, or translated fiction. Sometimes local authors dominate the front displays. Sometimes there’s a quiet reverence for small independent presses you’ve never heard of before.

Even the atmosphere reveals something.

Some bookstores feel intellectual and hushed, filled with students annotating paperbacks in corners. Others feel warm and chaotic, stacked floor-to-ceiling with secondhand books and handwritten recommendations tucked between shelves.

I’ve wandered through cramped secondhand shops in Melbourne, glossy multi-level bookstores in Bangkok, towering bookshops in New York, atmospheric independents in London, unexpected shelves tucked into side streets in Hong Kong, and quiet literary corners in Johannesburg reached after long walks through unfamiliar neighbourhoods. Long after I forget metro lines or street names, I remember those spaces clearly.

Bookshops don’t just reflect cities. They translate them.

A Different Kind of Souvenir

Whenever I travel, I tell myself I won’t buy books. And then I inevitably do.

A novel picked up before a train ride. A collection of essays found during a rainy afternoon. A book in translation I can only partially read but want anyway because it feels tied to that exact place and moment.

Books become heavier in your backpack as a trip continues, but somehow I never regret carrying them.

Unlike postcards or magnets, books absorb memory slowly. Years later, opening one can bring back entire fragments of a city: the café where you started reading it, the weather outside, the station announcement you half-heard while turning pages.

Sometimes receipts remain tucked inside them. Train tickets become accidental bookmarks. Sand settles invisibly into the spine after being carried through coastal towns. Humidity warps the covers slightly in tropical cities.

Even unread books hold emotional weight. There are books on my shelves I still haven’t picked up since I brought them home, but I remember exactly where I bought them.

Bookstores Make Solo Travel Feel Less Lonely

There’s also something comforting about bookstores when travelling alone.

Travel can be beautiful, but it can also feel strangely performative. Cities often encourage movement; seeing, documenting, consuming, moving again. There’s pressure to maximise time, to experience everything properly, to keep going.

Bookstores interrupt that rhythm.

Inside them, nobody expects anything from you. You can exist quietly for an hour without explanation. You can wander without destination. You can sit on the floor between shelves reading opening paragraphs while rain hits the windows outside.

In unfamiliar cities, bookstores often become my version of refuge. Not because they remove loneliness entirely, but because they soften it.

There’s comfort in recognising something familiar thousands of kilometres from home: stacked paperbacks, annotated staff recommendation cards, the quiet intimacy of people browsing alone together.

Every bookstore reminds you that somewhere nearby, somebody else also loves stories enough to build an entire room around them.

Reading a City Through Its Shelves

I think part of why I seek out bookstores while travelling is because they slow my attention down.

Travel is often framed around movement — where to go, what to see, how much ground you can cover in a limited amount of time. But bookstores invite the opposite instinct. They ask you to pause. To notice.

Inside a bookstore, you begin observing details differently.

The kinds of novels displayed at airport kiosks. The literary authors locals return to repeatedly. The covers that look completely different in another language. The small independent magazines near the register. The children sitting cross-legged reading in corners while parents disappear into other aisles.

You stop consuming a city visually and start listening to its quieter cultural conversations.

Sometimes I think I understand a place more honestly after wandering through its bookstores than after visiting its major attractions.

Because bookstores reveal aspiration. Curiosity. Memory. Taste. Politics. Imagination.

The Bookstores I Remember Most

Oddly, I rarely remember the specific books I buy while travelling as vividly as I remember the feeling of finding the bookstore itself.

A hidden second-floor shop discovered accidentally in London, stepping into the quiet wood-and-light calm of Daunt Books while escaping the rush of the street. A cramped secondhand store that smelled faintly of dust and paper and old wood in Johannesburg and London, where places like Love Books or Bridge Books feel like they’ve been pressed into the fabric of the street itself. A brightly lit bookstore near a station where I bought something impulsively before boarding an overnight journey or the unmistakable gravity of The Strand Bookstore just off the rhythm of the city’s transit lines.

These places become emotional landmarks, sometimes more than the monuments do.

Because travel memories are rarely built only from famous sights. More often, they’re constructed from quieter fragments: conversations overheard in cafés, streets walked repeatedly at dusk, songs attached to certain train rides, and bookstores wandered through slowly with nowhere urgent to be.

Why I’ll Keep Visiting Bookshops Wherever I Go

At this point, visiting bookstores while travelling has become less of a habit and more of a ritual.

It’s how I orient myself inside unfamiliar places.

Bookshops make cities feel human-sized again. They create pockets of stillness inside movement. They remind me that every place contains readers, dreamers, students, lonely people, curious people. People searching for stories just like I am.

And maybe that’s what I’m really looking for each time I push open another bookstore door in another unfamiliar city.

Not simply books, but recognition.

A way of feeling, however briefly, less like a tourist passing through and more like somebody capable of belonging there.