The Best Bookstores in the World

I’ve never trusted a city’s Google reviews as much as I trust its bookshops. A good one tells you almost everything you need to know about a place: what the locals are reading, what they’re arguing about, what kind of pace the neighbourhood moves at. Some are famous enough to need no introduction. Others are the kind you only find because someone who lives there insisted you go.

This list is a mix of both. A few grand, mythologised shops that earn the hype, and a couple of small neighbourhood ones that never will be famous outside their own postcode, and are better for it.

Shakespeare and Company, Paris

It’s almost a cliché to put Shakespeare and Company on a list like this, and I’m doing it anyway because the cliché is earned. Wedged across the river from Notre-Dame, the current shop traces its identity back to George Whitman, who opened it in the 1950s and let generations of young, broke writers sleep among the shelves in exchange for a few hours of work and a promise to read a book a day.

It’s crowded now, often absurdly so, full of tourists taking the same photo of the same stairwell. But linger past the entrance, into the smaller upstairs rooms with their reading nooks and typewriter, and it still feels like a shop built by someone who cared more about books than commerce. Rare, anywhere, let alone somewhere this famous.

Livraria Lello, Porto

Livraria Lello gets talked about mostly for its looks, the carved wooden staircase spiralling up through the centre of the shop, the stained glass ceiling filtering coloured light onto the shelves below, and the looks alone would justify the visit. What gets lost in the photographs is that it’s still a working bookshop with a strong, well-chosen selection, not just a backdrop.

Go early, before the tour groups arrive and the queue starts snaking down the street. The shop is small enough that crowds change its whole character, and large enough, if you catch it quiet, to feel like wandering into someone’s slightly excessive dream library.

Daunt Books, London

The Marylebone flagship is the reason Daunt makes this list: a long Edwardian shop with a galleried back room lit by a wall of skylights, oak balustrades running along both sides. What sets it apart isn’t just the architecture, though. Daunt organises its stock geographically rather than by the usual fiction and nonfiction split, so travel writing, novels, history, and maps about a single country all sit together on the same shelf.

It’s a small, obvious idea that somehow no one else seems to have properly committed to, and it changes how you browse. Standing in the France section, or the Japan section, surrounded by every kind of book about a single place, is close to the best possible argument for why a physical bookshop still beats scrolling a website.

The Paper Hound Bookshop, Vancouver

Set into the ground floor of a converted Victorian hotel on the edge of Gastown, The Paper Hound is small enough that you can take in the whole shop from the doorway, and specific enough in its taste that it rewards a much longer look than that. Owners Rod Clarke and Kim Koch, both booksellers long before they were shop owners, have built a stock heavy on poetry, philosophy, and the kind of secondhand editions you don’t stumble across twice.

There’s a sliding ladder, a resident penguin figurine at the till, and a habit of pricing books in pencil rather than sticker, all small signs of a shop run by people who think about bookselling as a craft rather than a transaction. It’s the kind of place you go in meaning to browse for ten minutes and leave an hour later, slightly poorer and considerably happier.

Bookazine, Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s independent bookshop scene has taken real losses in recent years, several long-loved shops closing under pressure from rising rents and a harder operating climate. Bookazine has outlasted most of them. Founded in 1985 by Mohan Mirchandani and now run by his daughter Shonee, it remains a family-owned, English-language mainstay in a city where that combination is increasingly rare.

It doesn’t trade on atmosphere the way some shops on this list do. What it offers instead is reliability: a serious, well-kept general selection, multiple branches across the city, and the quiet reassurance that comes from a bookshop that has simply kept its doors open, year after year, while others around it haven’t managed to.

Librairie Avant-Garde, Nanjing

The most striking bookshop I’ve ever walked into, and one of the strangest. Librairie Avant-Garde occupies a former underground car park and bomb shelter beneath Wutaishan Stadium, a cavernous, concrete space that founder Qian Xiaohua converted into what’s often called China’s most beautiful bookstore. A yellow traffic divider still runs down the centre of the floor, a leftover from its parking days, leading toward an enormous black cross on the far wall.

The scale of the place is disorienting in the best way, tens of thousands of books spread across a space built for cars, humanities and social science given the kind of reverence usually reserved for cathedrals. It’s a reminder that a bookshop’s setting doesn’t have to be pretty to be moving. Sometimes it just has to be unexpected.

Bookworm, Hanoi

Down a narrow alley off Chau Long Street, through a shaded courtyard that doubles as a café, Bookworm has been Hanoi’s main English-language bookshop since 2001, when it was started by Australian writer Pam Scott. It’s since grown into one of the largest foreign-language bookshops in the country, spread across two colourful floors, with a particularly strong selection of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian titles in English translation.

What stays with me most is the pace of the place. The courtyard slows you down before you’ve even opened a book, and the shop itself seems built for lingering rather than quick purchases, exactly the kind of bookshop that rewards showing up with no plan beyond an afternoon to spare.

Paperback Books, Melbourne

Paperback has been trading at the quiet top end of Bourke Street since the 1960s, tucked next to Pellegrini’s, and it has the kind of unpretentious, slightly chaotic charm that only comes from five decades of continuous operation. It’s small, and it makes the most of every inch, shelves stacked close enough that browsing becomes a slightly physical activity.

What I love about it is the hours. Open until 10 or 11pm most nights, it’s one of the only shops in the city built for the kind of late, aimless browsing that happens after dinner rather than before it. Half my impulse buys over the years have happened here, usually somewhere around 9pm, usually books I didn’t know I wanted until I was holding them.

Ramona Books, Melbourne

Ramona is newer and smaller than most shops on this list, a neighbourhood bookshop in Northcote’s Westgarth Village, opened by a first-time owner who took over the space when the previous shop closed rather than watch the neighbourhood lose it. That origin story shows in the way the shop is run: a monthly book club, staff recommendations given genuine prominence rather than treated as decoration, the sense of a shop built specifically for the people who live nearby rather than for foot traffic.

It’s the kind of place that reminds you a bookshop doesn’t need historical weight or architectural spectacle to matter. Sometimes it just needs someone who cares enough to keep the lights on and the shelves interesting.

What They All Have in Common

The grandest shops on this list earn their reputation from scale, history, or architecture, a converted theatre, a staircase, a bomb shelter turned cathedral of books. The smaller ones earn theirs from something quieter: a first-time owner who wouldn’t let a neighbourhood lose its shop, an alleyway courtyard that slows you down before you’ve opened a book, a shopkeeper who prices things in pencil because they’d rather talk to you about the book than about the barcode. Different scale, same instinct.

I think that’s the real thread running through every shop here, however famous or unfamous. Every one of them, in its own way, was built by someone who thought a good bookshop deserved the effort of making. You can tell, walking in. It’s the thing no amount of styling or stained glass can fake.