Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: Special bookshops

Chances are you’ve already seen this incredible round-up of the ten most beautiful bookshops in the world. This recent post on hip US blog Flavorwire has enjoyed remarkable success, inspiring several articles and a huge amount of praise and discussion in various forums worldwide. Over here in Britain, the Guardian’s article about it received nearly 200 comments.

If you’ve not yet looked at the photos, you’re in for a treat. These bookshops are beautiful, breathtaking, almost miraculous places. And the astonishing amount of buzz created around the post reassures me that I’m not alone in thinking this. Evidently, I’m just one of several thousand bookshop-lovers. And these people aren’t the old musty luddites that one might expect; over 9,000 of them are at least technically savvy enough to have tweeted about it.

But hang on a minute; I thought bookshops were supposed to be a dying breed. Aren’t they the horse-and-carts of the digital age? Usually it only takes an article about Amazon or outlining the problems faced by bricks-and-mortar bookshops to provoke a stream of comments cynically welcoming bookshop-lovers to the twenty-first century and telling them to get real.

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