The Most Beautiful Bookshops I’ve Visited While Travelling

Some bookshops are just places to buy a book. These aren’t those. Every one on this list is a destination in its own right — the kind of place you’d plan a stop around, not stumble into on the way to somewhere else. Eleven shops, four continents, and one running theme: the best bookshops are rarely just about the books.

Livraria Lello — Porto, Portugal

Opened in 1906, Livraria Lello is the one that started the “most beautiful bookshop in the world” conversation and has never quite let it go. The neo-Gothic façade is only a warm-up — inside, a blood-red staircase curls up through the centre of the shop beneath a stained-glass skylight, and the whole thing has the hush of a cathedral rather than a shop floor. It’s since become inseparable from J.K. Rowling, who lived in Porto while writing early drafts of Harry Potter and is widely thought to have drawn on Lello for Hogwarts’ staircases — enough that entry is now ticketed and timed, redeemable against a book purchase.

Daunt Books, Marylebone — London, UK

Founded in 1990 by James Daunt in an original Edwardian bookshop building, the Marylebone branch is built around one long, galleried room with oak shelving on two levels and a vast arched skylight pulling daylight straight down the centre. Its signature is the way it organises stock — fiction and non-fiction shelved together by country, so a novel sits next to the travel writing and history from the same place. It’s the kind of shop that makes browsing feel like planning a trip you haven’t booked yet.

Leakey’s Bookshop — Inverness, Scotland

Scotland’s largest secondhand bookshop lives inside a former Gaelic church, built in 1793 — high vaulted ceilings, a wood-burning stove in the middle of the floor, and something like 100,000 books stacked into what used to be pews and choir stalls. The building’s former life is still legible in the bones of the space, and getting lost here for an afternoon isn’t a risk so much as the entire point.

Barter Books — Alnwick, England

Housed in Alnwick’s former Victorian railway station, Barter Books kept much of the building’s original character — waiting-room fireplaces, a model train that still runs on a track above the shelves, and the framed original of the now-ubiquitous “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster, which the shop is credited with rediscovering and popularising in the early 2000s. Secondhand and quietly eccentric, it rewards slow browsing over quick visits.

The Strand — New York City, USA

“18 miles of books” is the shop’s own tagline, and it’s roughly accurate — The Strand has been operating since 1927 and has outlasted almost every other major independent bookshop in Manhattan. It’s less architecturally striking than some of the others on this list and more a New York institution in its own right: dense, towering shelves, a famous rare book room upstairs, and the sense that half the city’s writers have passed through at some point, buying or selling.

Librairie Avant-Garde — Nanjing, China

Librairie Avant-Garde turned a genuinely unlikely space into one of China’s most distinctive bookshops when it opened in 2004 inside a former underground car park — itself once used as an air-raid shelter. Concrete pillars, low ceilings, and rows of shelving stretch out under artificial light in a way that reads more like an art installation than retail. Its proximity to Nanjing University has made it something of an unofficial second library for students.

HARDCOVER: The Art Book Shop — Bangkok, Thailand

On the sixth floor of the Central Embassy mall’s Open House space, this shop specialises in art and design books but is as much a piece of architecture as a bookshop — double-height shelving, a glass mezzanine, and a level of visual design that feels closer to a small gallery than a place to grab an airport paperback. A good reminder that Bangkok‘s most striking bookshops are often hiding inside its shopping centres.

Cá Chép Bookstore — Hanoi, Vietnam

Spread across multiple bright, art-filled floors on Bà Triệu Street, Cá Chép blurs the line between bookshop, gallery, and café — Vietnamese and English titles share space with rotating art exhibitions, and a rooftop café gives it a reason to linger well past however long it takes to pick a book.

Kalk Bay Books — Cape Town, South Africa

Set in a converted Victorian corner store in the seaside village of Kalk Bay, this shop has been called — by more than one reviewer — the bookshop with the most beautiful view in the world, courtesy of the ocean just across the railway tracks outside. It’s small, unpretentious, and locally loved, with comfy couches that make it easy to justify staying far longer than you meant to.

McMillan Memorial Library — Nairobi, Kenya

Not a bookshop, technically — but its story felt too good to leave out. Built in 1931 in a neoclassical style, complete with lion statues flanking the entrance, McMillan Memorial is Nairobi’s oldest library and is currently mid-restoration by Book Bunk Trust, a nonprofit working to bring the city’s historic public libraries back to life. It’s a reminder that “beautiful literary spaces” isn’t only a bookshop category — and that some of the most interesting ones are still being rebuilt.

The Paper Hound Bookshop — Vancouver, Canada

Set inside Vancouver’s historic Victoria Block downtown, The Paper Hound deals in new, used, and rare titles in a small space that leans hard into the eclectic — vintage décor, hand-lettered category signs for things like “Indomitable Orphans,” and a browsing experience built for readers who want the “curious, odd, beautiful, visually arresting” end of a bookshop rather than a clean, orderly one. Half the pleasure here is not knowing which section you’ve wandered into.

Bonus: My Favourite at Home — Paperback Books, Melbourne

At the quiet, top end of Bourke Street, Paperback Books has been going since the mid-1960s — opened with the idea of getting paperback editions of overseas and otherwise hard-to-find titles into Melbourne readers’ hands, at a time when plenty of that stock was still tangled up in Australia’s censorship laws. It’s small, a little mazy, open unusually late most nights, and has outlasted most of the chain stores that have come and gone around it on the same block. No café, no merchandise gimmicks — just an excellent, staff-curated selection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and classics, handled by people who clearly read everything they sell. This is the kind of shop that explains why “local bookshop” is a phrase people say with real affection.