Fourteen bookshops in converted churches, banks, theatres, and stations, from El Ateneo Grand Splendid to Barter Books and Powell’s City of Books.
Early one morning in 1984, a bookseller named Jim Munro let himself into an empty bank and recited Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to the marble. He’d just bought the building, which had sat on the market for years. He paid $360,000 for it because, as he later put it, “nobody wanted a used bank building.” But he saw potential in its elaborate detailing and grand columns.
Every shop in this guide made the same bet. Not one of them was originally built to sell books. They were built for friars and tango audiences, for wool merchants and railway passengers; for cows, cars, newspapers and men’s suits. Then the original purpose ran out, and someone with a great many boxes and not much money looked at the empty space and saw shelving.
What follows is a tour of 14 such buildings, grouped by what they used to do. The old habits are still visible if you look: yellow traffic stripes, a bank vault, a pulpit, a station clock. But a bookshop, it turns out, is the most forgiving tenant a building can have. It asks only for walls, light, and people willing to read.
The Former Churches
Boekhandel Dominicanen, Maastricht, Netherlands
The Dominicans consecrated this Gothic church in 1294 and held it for five centuries, until the French arrived in the 1790s and turned it into a stable for their cavalry. Worse followed. For much of the twentieth century, Maastricht used the nave as a bicycle shed.
Then in 2006, the architects Merkx+Girod slid a three-storey black steel book tower into one side of the space, to keep the center aisle and vaulted ceilings clear, and Boekhandel Dominicanen opened its doors. A 1337 wall painting of Thomas Aquinas survives on the north wall; the café sits where the altar stood. Around 700,000 people a year now come in, which is a congregation the friars of old could have never dreamed of.
Address: Dominicanerkerkstraat 1, 6211 CZ Maastricht, Netherlands
Opening hours:
– Monday: 10AM – 6PM
– Tuesday to Saturday: 9AM – 6PM
– Sunday: 12PM – 6PM
Van der Velde (formerly Waanders In de Broeren), Zwolle, Netherlands
Zwolle’s Dominicans started the Broerenkerk in 1466, and Zwolle’s Protestants whitewashed it in 1640. That whitewash turned out to be a time capsule. When the city restored the empty church in the 1980s, 139 16th-century paintings on the vaulted ceilings emerged from under the plaster: saints, scenes from the life of Christ, local coats of arms.
The Waanders family, booksellers in the city since 1836, converted the church and opened their shop on 13 July 2013, with three new floors tucked into the side aisle and the 1824 Scheuer organ still ready to play at the far end. A doorway sealed for centuries was reopened so browsers can walk from the nave into the old cloister. And while the name over the bookstore’s door changed in 2022, the ceiling and its works of art didn’t.
Address: Achter de Broeren 1-3, 8011 VA Zwolle, Netherlands
Opening hours:
– Monday: 12PM – 6PM
– Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday: 9:30AM – 6PM
– Thursday: 9:30AM – 9PM
– Sunday: 12PM – 5PM
Leakey’s Bookshop, Inverness, Scotland
Charles Leakey started selling books in 1979 and, in the mid-1990s, moved into an old Gaelic church built in 1793. Leakey’s is Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop, with some 100,000 volumes on two floors joined by a spiral staircase, the pulpit still standing among the shelves.
A wood-burning stove also sits in the middle of the floor, and the shop’s own description admits it has “filled many customers with amazement and some with dread.” On a Highland winter afternoon, with the fire going and the light coming grey through the arched windows, it’s the warmest and least hurried room in Inverness.
Address: Church St, Inverness IV1 1EY, United Kingdom
Opening hours:
– Tuesday to Saturday: 10AM – 5:30PM
– Monday and Sunday: Closed
The Former Banks
The Last Bookstore, Los Angeles, USA
Josh Spencer started selling books from a downtown loft in 2005 and named the venture with deliberate irony. In June 2011, he moved it into the marble-columned ground floor of a 1914 bank at Fifth and Spring, and The Last Bookstore became one of the largest independent bookshops in the country. The former bank vault now proudly touts a horror section, which Spencer says is his favorite corner.
Upstairs, in the Labyrinth, a tunnel built from books has become one of the most photographed spots in the city. Spencer has said he wanted visitors to feel they’d stepped through a wardrobe into another world.
Address: 453 S Spring St Ground Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90013, United States
Opening hours:
– Monday and Tuesday: 11AM – 8PM
– Wednesday to Sunday: 11AM – 11PM
Cărturești Carusel, Bucharest, Romania
The Chrissoveloni banking family bought this 19th-century building on Lipscani Street in 1903 and ran their bank from it until the communist state took it away and made it a department store called Familia. By the 1990s, it was empty.
The family got it back, and after a five-year restoration by Square One architects, Cărturești Carusel opened in February 2015: six white levels curving around a skylit atrium, a bistro at the top, and a gallery in the basement. Bucharest nicknamed it the Carousel of Light. When asked “why a bookshop?” the owner said Cărturești was simply the first name he thought of for the building. Some decisions look like fate only afterwards.
Address: Strada Lipscani 55, 030033 București, Romania
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 10AM – 10PM
Munro’s Books, Victoria, Canada
Before the bank, there was a long, narrow shop on Yates Street that Jim Munro opened in 1963 with his first wife, Alice. She worked shifts there and, according to Jim, got so fed up with the stock that she announced she could write better books herself. And she did; well enough, in fact, to win the Nobel Prize.
The 1909 Royal Bank building on Government Street, designed by Thomas Hooper and listed on Canada’s register of historic places, has been Munro’s since 1984, hung with tapestries by the textile artist Carole Sabiston. When Jim retired in 2014, he gave the business to four long-time staff. Owning the building, he said, was what saved the shop when the chains came. He’d bought more than a room; he’d bought time.
Address: 1108 Government St, Victoria, BC V8W 1Y2, Canada
Opening hours:
– Monday to Wednesday, and Sunday: 9:30AM – 6PM
– Thursday to Saturday: 9:30AM – 7:30PM
The Former Places of Trade and Transit
Waterstones Bradford, England
In the 1860s Bradford, then the wool capital of the world, asked John Ruskin how to design its new exchange. Ruskin came, lectured, and told the city he didn’t care about the building because they didn’t either. They built it anyway: Lockwood and Mawson’s Venetian Gothic hall, foundation stone laid by Lord Palmerston in 1864. It was completed in 1867 and described by the Bradford Civic Society as of national importance.
Wool trading stopped in the early 1970s, and the building fell into disuse. Waterstones arrived in 1996, put in glass walls that let daylight into a hall built for gaslight, and now sells novels beneath the hammer-beam roof. A statue of Richard Cobden still presides over the fiction section. His plinth reads “Free Trade Peace Goodwill Among Nations.” Under the circumstances, that’s not a bad motto for a bookshop.
Address: The Wool Exchange, Hustlergate, Bradford BD1 1BL, United Kingdom
Opening hours:
– Monday to Saturday: 9AM – 5:30PM
– Sunday: 10:30AM – 4:30PM
Barter Books, Alnwick, England
Alnwick’s railway station, originally built in 1850 and redesigned by William Bell in 1887, was absurdly grand for a small market town because the Dukes of Northumberland needed somewhere fit to receive royalty. However, the line closed in 1968, leaving a majestic building with no purpose.
In 1991 Mary and Stuart Manley opened Barter Books in the front of their small factory there, trading on the principle that customers could swap their own books for credit. A model railway runs at head height above the stacks. Open fires burn in the old waiting rooms, where the Station Buffet serves lunch. And in 2000, in a box of books bought at auction, Stuart found one of the few surviving copies of a 1939 government poster reading “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Mary framed it.
Address: Alnwick Station, Alnwick NE66 2NP, United Kingdom
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 9AM – 7PM
Waterstones Piccadilly, London, England
When Simpsons of Piccadilly opened in April 1936, it was the biggest menswear store in Britain and a piece of modernist bravado: Joseph Emberton’s design, László Moholy-Nagy’s interiors, a welded steel frame by the engineer Felix Samuely, and the first uninterrupted curved glass shopfront in the country, according to the Twentieth Century Society. It is also said to have inspired the sitcom Are You Being Served?
Waterstones bought it in 1999, and the shop is now the largest bookshop in Europe, six floors and some eight miles of shelving, with a bar on the fifth floor looking towards Parliament. The chrome light fitting still drops through the stairwell. The building barely even noticed that the suits were out and the sentences were in.
Address: 203-206 Piccadilly, London W1J 9HD, United Kingdom
Opening hours:
– Monday to Saturday: 9AM – 9PM
– Sunday: 12PM – 6PM
Librairie Avant-Garde, Nanjing, China
You enter up a concrete ramp, and the yellow traffic stripes are still painted on the floor. This 4,000-square-metre hall beneath Wutaishan Stadium was a bomb shelter, then a government car park, before Qian Xiaohua turned it into a bookshop that opened in 2004. He likes to quote a Chinese saying about turning something rotten into a miracle.
If you look back from the top of the ramp, a huge cross glows on the wall behind you, a mark of Qian’s own faith. A replica of Rodin’s Thinker stands at the entrance; the till is built from books. Students from Nanjing University next door call it their second library. It has no windows and no view because it doesn’t need either: the inside is striking enough.
Address: 173 Guangzhou Rd, Gulou, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China, 210008
Opening hours:
– Monday to Thursday: 10AM – 9PM
– Friday to Sunday: 10AM – 10PM
Powell’s City of Books, Portland, USA
Walter Powell, a retired painting contractor, caught the bookselling bug helping his son Michael in Chicago in 1971, went home to Portland and started buying every saleable used book that came through the door. The overflow pushed him into a former car dealership on West Burnside, and Powell’s has been growing into the block ever since: 68,000 square feet, nine colour-coded rooms, and new and used books shelved together, which nobody did in 1971.
The company says you can still spot traces of the building’s automotive past if you look. A showroom built for one or two big purchases now handles thousands of small ones a day.
Address: 1005 W Burnside St, Portland, OR 97209, United States
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 10AM – 9PM
The Former Working Buildings
Ler Devagar, Lisbon, Portugal
The name means “read slowly,” and it was a Bairro Alto collective before it was a shop. Since 2009, it has occupied a former printing works inside LX Factory, a nineteenth-century textile complex in Alcântara that Lisbon let decay just long enough for the artists to move in. The press is still here: an iron machine several storeys high, with shelves running up around it on metal walkways. There’s something poetic in a machine that once printed words now standing quietly among them.
Suspended above the floor, a white figure pedals a flying bicycle, one of the kinetic sculptures that Pietro Proserpio, an Italian who came to Lisbon as a boy in 1949, built from recycled parts. The bookstore also has a bar where you can read with a drink.
Address: R. Rodrigues de Faria 103 – G 0.3, 1300-501 Lisboa, Portugal
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 10AM – 9PM
Baldwin’s Book Barn, West Chester, Pennsylvania, USA
Brinton and Sarah Darlington, two Quakers, built this stone dairy barn in 1822. William and Lilla Baldwin, who’d been selling books in Wilmington since 1934, bought it in 1946, moved into the milking house and filled the barn. It had three floors; William hired an engineer and added two more, and you can still find the seam.
Baldwin’s now holds some 300,000 books, maps, and prints across five low-ceilinged storeys, heated by a single wood stove. Their son Tom ran it until his death in 2019, and its manager, Carol Rauch, is still working the floor in her 90’s. Cows kept this building warm for a century. The stove and the readers do it now.
Address: 865 Lenape Rd, West Chester, PA 19382, United States
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 10AM – 5:30PM
The Former Theatre
El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The Teatro Gran Splendid opened in May 1919 for the impresario (like a producer, but for plays and operas and such) Max Glücksmann, with 1,050 seats and a cupola by Nazareno Orlandi painted as an allegory of peace after the Great War. Singer-composer Carlos Gardel recorded here, and Radio Splendid broadcast from the building from 1923.
In 1929, it became a cinema and showed Argentina its first talking pictures. In 2000, it became a bookshop, and almost nothing in the architecture was thrown away: the boxes are reading nooks, the stage holds a café, the crimson curtain still hangs. National Geographic named it the world’s most beautiful bookstore in 2019. Sit in a box on a weekday morning and watch the light come down from Orlandi’s ceiling. The performance never stopped; it just slowed down.
Address: Av. Sta. Fe 1860, C1123 Cdad. Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Opening hours:
– Monday to Saturday: 9AM – 9PM
– Sunday: 12PM – 9PM
What the Buildings Remember
None of these 14 shops set out to preserve anything. Each began as a practical problem: too many books, not enough money, and an odd empty building nobody else could think what to do with. Yet between them they’ve kept a Gothic ceiling, a Victorian station, a bomb shelter, a modernist shopfront, and a dairy barn in daily public use. The old uses were exclusive. You needed a ticket, a bank account, a faith, a train to catch. The new use asks nothing of you but curiosity, and it takes all comers.
That is the quiet argument these rooms make. A city doesn’t have to knock down what it no longer needs. It can hand the keys to its readers, who will light the stove, keep the traffic stripes, and let the organ play. Go and stand in one. Look up. Then look at the person beside you, reading in a bank vault or a box seat, entirely at home in a building that was never meant for them and now belongs to everyone.
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Adam Ryan
Adam is a distinguished content writer, bookworm, and full-time adventurer with a constant craving for coffee. When he's not working, he loves exploring remote corners of the world, immersing himself in different cultures, and writing about his experiences.
