The 10 Best Independent Bookstores Worth Visiting
2024-11-08 · 7 min read
Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon, occupies an entire city block and contains over a million books. It is the largest independent bookstore in the world, organized into color-coded rooms that you can get lost in for hours. The mix of new and used stock means you might find a first edition next to a remaindered paperback. It is a labyrinth with a coffee shop.
Shakespeare and Company in Paris sits on the Left Bank across from Notre-Dame, and it is exactly as romantic as that sounds. The current shop, opened in 1951, carries on the legacy of Sylvia Beach's original, which published James Joyce's Ulysses. Writers can sleep among the shelves in exchange for helping out, and the readings attract literary heavyweights regularly.
The Strand in New York City advertises 18 miles of books, and that might be an undercount. The flagship on Broadway and 12th Street has been open since 1927 and survived every economic downturn, including the one everyone assumed would kill it. The basement rare book room is worth the visit alone, and the dollar carts outside are a New York institution.
Libreria in London's Shoreditch neighborhood organizes books by theme rather than genre or author. Instead of fiction and nonfiction sections, you find shelves labeled things like Enchantment for the Disenchanted and The Sea and the Sky. The space was designed by artist and writer Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, and it makes browsing feel like exploring someone's brilliant, eccentric mind.
City Lights in San Francisco is where Allen Ginsberg's Howl was first published, making it arguably the most important bookstore in American literary history. Founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, it remains a beacon for progressive literature and poetry. The upstairs poetry room is a quiet sanctuary in the middle of North Beach.
Also worth the trip: Daunt Books in London, Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Tattered Cover in Denver, and Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, whose gorgeous neo-Gothic interior reportedly inspired Hogwarts. Independent bookstores are not just surviving, they are thriving because algorithms will never replicate the experience of browsing.
