I’ve been collecting bookstores the way some people collect stamps or restaurant recommendations. Wherever I travel, for work or otherwise, I find the local independent bookshop. Sometimes it’s a planned stop; sometimes I just stumble across it while walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood. Over the years, I’ve built a mental map of bookstores around the world, and the best ones have become places I return to whenever I’m nearby. A great bookstore isn’t just a place that sells books. It’s a place that understands books, that has opinions about them, that introduces you to things you didn’t know you wanted to read.

What follows is a personal list. These are bookstores I’ve visited and loved. They’re not the most famous or the most Instagrammed (though some are both). They’re the ones where I’ve had the best experiences as a reader and as a publisher. I’ve tried to spread the list geographically, because great bookstores exist everywhere, not just in London and New York.

Powell’s City of Books, Portland, Oregon

I have to start here, because Powell’s is the bookstore that ruined me for all other bookstores, at least for a while. It occupies an entire city block in downtown Portland, with over a million volumes spread across multiple floors and color-coded rooms. The first time I walked in, I got lost for four hours. I mean genuinely lost: I couldn’t find the exit and didn’t particularly care.

What makes Powell’s special isn’t just the size, though the size is staggering. It’s the curation. New and used books sit side by side on the same shelves, which creates a browsing experience unlike anything I’ve encountered elsewhere. You’ll be looking at a new novel and right next to it find a used first edition of something you’ve been hunting for years. The staff picks are genuinely helpful, reflecting the individual tastes of actual readers rather than whatever the publisher is pushing this week. And the store has a seriousness of purpose that you can feel when you walk in. It takes books seriously. It expects you to take them seriously too.

Powell’s also buys used books from the public, which means the inventory is constantly changing. Every visit is different. I’ve found out-of-print academic texts, forgotten 1970s paperbacks, and obscure poetry chapbooks on their shelves. If you’re ever in Portland, block out an afternoon. You’ll need it.

Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Yes, this is the obvious Paris bookstore. Yes, it’s touristy. I don’t care. Shakespeare and Company earns its reputation. The current shop, on the Left Bank facing Notre-Dame, was opened in 1951 by George Whitman and named in tribute to Sylvia Beach’s original shop that had been a gathering place for Hemingway, Joyce, and the Lost Generation in the 1920s. It’s been a literary landmark for over seventy years, and it still functions as a living, breathing bookstore rather than a museum.

The ground floor is a well-stocked English-language bookshop with strong sections in literary fiction, philosophy, and poetry. Upstairs is a chaotic, beautiful warren of reading nooks, old typewriters, handwritten quotes on the walls, and beds where the store’s “Tumbleweeds” (visiting writers given free lodging in exchange for working in the shop) sleep at night. The atmosphere is romantic in the best sense: it makes you believe in the life of the mind as something worth pursuing.

I’ve bought books there on every visit to Paris. The last time, I picked up a novel by a French author I’d never heard of, recommended by the young woman at the register, and it turned out to be one of the best things I read that year. That’s the promise of a good bookstore: it connects you with books you never would have found on your own.

City Lights Books, San Francisco

City Lights has literary history embedded in its walls. Founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin in 1953, it was the first all-paperback bookstore in the country and became the de facto headquarters of the Beat Generation. Ferlinghetti’s publishing arm, City Lights Publishers, published Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and defended it against obscenity charges in a trial that helped define free speech protections for literature in America.

The store itself is on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, occupying a three-story building with creaking floors and a basement poetry section that feels like a sacred space. The selection is politically engaged, heavily weighted toward poetry, small press literature, progressive politics, and international writing in translation. It’s a bookstore with a point of view, which I find infinitely more interesting than one that tries to stock everything for everyone.

What I appreciate most about City Lights is its commitment to literature that challenges the mainstream. The shelf labels alone are an education: “Stolen Continents,” “Muckraking,” “Commodity Aesthetics.” You won’t find a bestseller display at the front of the store. You’ll find books you’ve never heard of, by writers from countries you might not be able to locate on a map. This is a bookstore that takes its role as a cultural institution seriously, and visiting it feels like an act of intellectual engagement.

Daunt Books, Marylebone, London

The Marylebone flagship of Daunt Books is the most beautiful bookstore I’ve ever been inside. It’s housed in an Edwardian building with long oak galleries, skylights, and William Morris-print stained glass. The architecture would be enough to recommend it, but the books match the setting.

Daunt’s organizing principle is unique: the back room is arranged by country. Rather than separating fiction from non-fiction, each country section brings together novels, history, travel writing, cookbooks, and anything else related to that part of the world. Looking for books about Japan? You’ll find Murakami next to a history of the Meiji Restoration next to a Japanese cookbook, all on the same shelves. This arrangement encourages a kind of lateral browsing that other organizational systems don’t. You go in looking for one thing and come out with something completely different but equally wonderful.

The front room is more conventionally organized, with excellent new fiction and non-fiction displays and staff picks that I’ve learned to trust over many visits. Daunt has expanded to several locations across London, but the Marylebone shop remains the essential one. Go early on a weekday if you can. On Saturday afternoons it’s packed.

El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires

El Ateneo is a bookstore in a former theater, and the effect is exactly as dramatic as that sounds. The building was constructed in 1919 as the Teatro Grand Splendid, a 1,050-seat theater that later became a cinema. In 2000, it was converted into a bookstore, preserving the original frescoed ceiling, ornate balconies, and crimson stage curtains. The theater boxes have been turned into reading nooks. The stage is a cafe. You browse for books beneath a painted dome of angels and classical figures.

It sounds like it could be gimmicky, a bookstore trading on spectacle rather than substance. But El Ateneo is also a very good bookstore. The selection, primarily in Spanish, covers fiction, history, philosophy, art, and Argentine literature with real depth. The staff is knowledgeable and the prices are reasonable. I speak only enough Spanish to get by, but on my visit I found several books in translation and a beautiful edition of Borges’s collected fictions that I carried home in my luggage.

What El Ateneo represents, beyond its physical beauty, is the idea that a bookstore can be a civic space. A place where a city gathers, not to shop but to participate in cultural life. Buenos Aires has more bookstores per capita than almost any other city in the world, and El Ateneo is the grandest expression of a reading culture that permeates the entire city.

Treadwell’s, London

Treadwell’s is a tiny bookshop near the British Museum that specializes in esotericism, mythology, folklore, and what the owners describe as “the encyclopaedia of the encyclopaedia.” It’s a niche shop, and that’s exactly why I love it. The selection is deeply curated by people who genuinely know their subject. You’ll find academic texts on alchemy next to contemporary books about tarot next to medieval grimoire facsimiles next to poetry collections inspired by myth.

I include Treadwell’s because it represents something about independent bookstores that chain stores and online retailers can never replicate: passionate expertise in a specific domain. The people who work at Treadwell’s can recommend books about Hermetic philosophy or Scandinavian folklore or the history of witchcraft trials with the same confidence and specificity that a great wine shop can recommend a bottle of Burgundy. This kind of deep, specialized knowledge is the independent bookstore’s competitive advantage, and Treadwell’s deploys it brilliantly.

The Strand, New York City

The Strand advertises “18 miles of books,” and while I haven’t measured, the claim feels plausible. This is New York’s most famous independent bookstore, occupying a massive space on Broadway near Union Square. The ground floor is new books, curated with the kind of intelligence you’d expect from a store that’s survived in Manhattan since 1927. The basement is review copies and bargain books, a treasure hunter’s paradise where you can find nearly new hardcovers for a few dollars. The upper floors are rare and collectible books.

The Strand’s buyer is legendary in the industry for selecting a stock that balances commercial appeal with genuine literary quality. The staff pick shelves are worth the trip alone. I’ve discovered more books through Strand staff picks than through any review publication. There’s also something about the physical experience of the Strand, the sheer density of books, the narrow aisles, the feeling of being surrounded on all sides by more reading material than you could get through in a lifetime, that creates a productive disorientation. You go in with a plan and leave with five books you’d never heard of.

As a publisher, I have a particular appreciation for the Strand’s commitment to stocking small press titles alongside the big publishers. When we send copies of a new ScrollWorks title like The Last Archive or Echoes of Iron, we know they’ll be given a fair shot on the shelves alongside books from publishers with ten times our marketing budget. That’s what independent bookstores do for small publishers: they level the field.

Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice

This one is eccentric enough that I debated including it. Libreria Acqua Alta (the “High Water Bookshop”) stores its books in gondolas, bathtubs, and waterproof bins because the shop floods regularly during Venice’s acqua alta tides. There’s a staircase made of ruined books. There’s a cat sleeping on a pile of Italian novels. The whole place looks like what would happen if a bookstore and a junk shop had a beautiful, chaotic child.

But here’s the thing: beyond the Instagram-friendly quirks, it’s actually a solid used bookshop with a strong selection of Italian literature, art books, and Venice-related titles. The owner, Luigi Frizzo, is a character in the best possible sense, opinionated about books and happy to recommend them. I spent an hour there on my last visit to Venice and left with a stack of Italian-language poetry that I’m still working through, slowly, with a dictionary.

I include Libreria Acqua Alta because it embodies something I value in bookstores: personality. This is a shop that could only exist in one place, run by one person, shaped by one set of enthusiasms. It couldn’t be franchised. It couldn’t be replicated. It’s specific and strange and completely itself. The best bookstores always are.

Munro’s Books, Victoria, British Columbia

Founded in 1963 by Jim Munro and his then-wife Alice Munro (yes, the Nobel Prize-winning short story writer), Munro’s Books is housed in a heritage building on Government Street in Victoria. The interior is gorgeous: high ceilings, neoclassical columns, and a layout that manages to feel both grand and intimate. It’s one of the finest independent bookstores in Canada, and it would be a world-class bookstore in any city.

The selection is strong across the board, with particularly good Canadian literature, poetry, and children’s book sections. The staff recommendations are excellent. And there’s a quality to the browsing experience at Munro’s that’s hard to describe: a sense of unhurriedness, of being given permission to take your time, to pick up books and read the first few pages, to change your mind, to wander. Not all bookstores communicate this. Some are beautiful but feel like galleries where you’re afraid to touch anything. Munro’s invites you in.

Livraria Lello, Porto, Portugal

Livraria Lello is often called one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, and the claim is justified. The interior, designed in 1906 by the engineer Xavier Esteves, features a massive carved wooden staircase that splits and curves upward to a second floor, stained glass ceilings, and elaborately decorated walls. It’s said to have inspired J.K. Rowling’s depiction of Diagon Alley and Flourish and Blotts, which may or may not be true (Rowling lived in Porto in the early 1990s while writing the first Harry Potter book).

The bookstore now charges a small entry fee (redeemable against a book purchase), which keeps the crowd manageable and ensures that most visitors are there to buy books rather than just take photographs. The selection is weighted toward Portuguese literature, art, and architecture, with a reasonable English-language section. I bought a beautiful edition of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry there, which felt appropriate given the setting.

What strikes me about Livraria Lello, beyond its obvious beauty, is that it’s survived. Porto has been through economic upheavals, wars, and the digital disruption that threatened all bookstores. Livraria Lello adapted (the entry fee was controversial but probably saved the business) and endured. There’s something encouraging about that. Beauty and books and stubborn persistence, all under one roof.

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, Chicago

If you’re an academic or a serious non-fiction reader, Seminary Co-op is the bookstore of your dreams. Located near the University of Chicago, it has what I consider the best curated non-fiction selection in North America. Philosophy, history, political theory, science, literary criticism: every section reflects a deep understanding of the field and a willingness to stock the important books rather than just the popular ones.

Seminary Co-op is organized as an actual cooperative, owned by its members (membership costs $30 and grants a share in the business). This structure gives it independence from the commercial pressures that shape chain store inventory. The buyers can stock books they believe in rather than books they think will sell the most copies. This results in a selection that’s challenging, intellectually serious, and occasionally surprising.

Its sister store, 57th Street Books (in the basement of a building a few blocks away), handles fiction, children’s books, and more general-interest titles with equal intelligence. Together, the two stores represent the best of what academic-adjacent bookstores can be: intellectually ambitious without being exclusionary, well-organized without being sterile, and deeply committed to the idea that books are tools for thinking.

Why Independent Bookstores Matter

I’ve described ten bookstores that I love, but I could have described a hundred. Every city I’ve visited has at least one independent bookshop worth knowing about, from the tiny single-room shops in small towns to the sprawling multi-floor stores in major cities. They differ in size, specialization, and personality, but they share something fundamental: they’re places where human judgment, rather than an algorithm, determines what you encounter.

Amazon’s recommendation engine is sophisticated, but it’s based on purchase history and collective patterns. It shows you what people like you have bought. An independent bookstore’s buyer, on the other hand, is a person with taste, knowledge, and the willingness to take risks on books that don’t have obvious commercial appeal. They’ll stock a debut novel because they believe in it, or a translated work because they think it deserves a wider audience, or a small press title because the writing is remarkable. They make these choices based on having read the books, or at least having read enough to form a judgment about them.

At ScrollWorks, our relationship with independent bookstores is personal. We know the buyers. We talk to them about our upcoming titles. We send them advance copies and ask for their honest reactions. When an indie bookseller decides to hand-sell one of our books, recommending it face-to-face to customers, it can make a real difference in the book’s trajectory. Some of our best-selling titles found their audience through exactly this kind of personal recommendation from booksellers who read the book and believed in it.

If you have an independent bookstore in your neighborhood, go in. Browse. Buy something. Talk to the staff. Let them recommend something you wouldn’t have found on your own. These places exist because people care about books enough to stake their livelihoods on selling them. They deserve our support, and they reward it with the kind of reading experiences that an algorithm will never replicate.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.