Most bookshops are already a small miracle of range. This one is about the rare few that chose depth instead, and why that choice is its own kind of beautiful.
Most bookshops are already a small miracle. Walk into a good general bookshop, and you can find almost anything: a thriller for the beach, a cookbook for Sunday, a biography for the flight, or a picture book for a niece who just turned four. That range is the whole point, and it is genuinely lovely: a single room built to serve a stranger’s every possible taste, curated by fellow readers, so that whoever walks through the door walks out with something.
But general bookshops aren’t the only sort out there.
A specialist bookshop or library makes the opposite promise. It says: not everything, just this one thing delved into deeply, with a decades-long paper trail, forged by people who could not stop. The collection in a specialist library often isn’t loaned out at all, only for sitting with: records to be played, rare volumes handled with gloves, a hoard held in trust rather than turned over. Walk into a place that carries only titles relating to the sea, or only theatre, or only books made by artists, and the narrowness is not a limit, but an invitation to dive in deep.
Nine such places, shops and libraries both, open the first half of a two-part survey. Between them, they have survived rent hikes, obscenity trials, and the flattening pressure of the algorithm. What they prove is that a room can be a form of citizenship, a place where strangers who care about the same odd thing can find one another.
1. Daunt Books, London: Travel and Place
Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street occupies a building completed in 1912 for the antiquarian dealer Francis Edwards, long said to be the world’s first purpose-built bookshop. James Daunt took it over in 1990 and kept its long oak galleries, skylights, stained glass and walk-in safe, then imposed one radical rule: shelve by country, not genre. A traveler bound for Peru finds guidebooks, history, poetry and novels together, because atmosphere is as useful as an itinerary. It is a geography lesson disguised as retail.
Address: 84 Marylebone High St, London W1U 4QW, United Kingdom
Opening hours:
– Monday to Saturday: 9AM – 7:30PM
– Sunday: 11AM – 6PM
2. La Libreria del Mare, Milan: The Sea
Milan is landlocked, which makes the focus of La Libreria del Mare’s collection more interesting. Founded in 1976 inside an old delicatessen on Via Broletto, it kept the shop’s antique cherry-wood fittings and filled them with nearly 10,000 titles on navigation, boatbuilding, fishing, naval history and shipwrecks, alongside a formidable stock of nautical charts built up over decades of searching.
Piera Casari, who took over the shop and shaped it into what it is today, remains its resident chart expert. Italy’s Ministry of Culture added the shop to its register of quality bookshops, Albo Delle Librerie di Qualità, for both 2021-2023 and 2024-2026.
Address: Via Broletto, 28, 20121 Milano MI, Italy
Opening hours:
– Monday to Saturday: 10AM – 5:30PM
– Sunday: Closed
3. Hyundai Card Music Library, Seoul: Music
Seoul’s most analog music room was built by a credit card company. Opened in 2015 in Hannam-dong, the Music Library holds roughly ten thousand vinyl records and 3,000 music books, plus every issue of Rolling Stone since 1967, with turntables provided for browsing. In a neighbourhood where buildings are crowded close together, architect Choi Moon-kyu designed the library to leave half the property outdoors, covered by a corrugated roof and a single wall (each decorated with distinctive art), with a spectacular view across the city.
Downstairs is a concert hall called Understage, which holds up to 500 standing. The only catch is that access to the collection floors is limited to Hyundai Card members, who can be accompanied by up to two guests.
Address: 246 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan District, Seoul, South Korea
Opening hours:
– Tuesday to Saturday: 12PM – 9PM
– Sunday: 12PM – 6PM
– Monday: Closed
4. Yvon Lambert, Paris: Art and Design
For nearly fifty years, Yvon Lambert ran one of Europe’s most consequential contemporary art galleries from 1966 until 2014, showing the works of famous artists like Carl Andre and Lawrence Weiner. In 2012, he donated more than 500 works from his personal collection to the French state, and two years later, at the end of 2014, he closed the gallery for good and chose books instead.
Today, Yvon Lambert Libraire Éditeur, run with his daughter Ève on Rue des Filles du Calvaire, combines a bookshop, publishing house, and exhibition space. In it, you can find contemporary art books, catalogues, out-of-print rarities, posters and editions, in a Marais storefront that still functions as a gathering point for artists.
Address: 14 Rue des Filles du Calvaire, 75003 Paris, France
Opening hours:
– Tuesday to Saturday: 10AM – 7PM
– Sunday: 2PM – 7PM
– Monday: Closed
5. Marcus Campbell Art Books, London: Rare Art Books and Ephemera
In 1998, anticipating Tate Modern’s opening two years later, Marcus Campbell set up on Holland Street in Bankside, on the ground floor of a round yellow tower 50 yards from the gallery. The shop deals in out-of-print, second-hand, and rare books on 20th-century and contemporary art, photography, architecture, and design, along with monographs, exhibition catalogues, artists’ books, periodicals, and posters.
Address: 43 Holland St, London SE1 9JR, United Kingdom
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 12PM – 4PM
6. Printed Matter, New York: Artists’ Books
In 1976, a group of artists and critics including Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Edit DeAk, Walter Robinson and Pat Steir founded Printed Matter in response to a gallery system that was treating artists’ books as promotional trinkets rather than art in their own right. The organisation became nonprofit in 1979, defining itself as a service and an educational vehicle rather than a shop with a bottom line.
Fifty years on, after moving from its original spot in Tribeca to SoHo and finally to Chelsea, it remains the world’s leading advocate for the form.
Address: 231 11th Ave, New York, NY 10001, United States
Opening hours:
– Tuesday to Saturday: 11AM – 7PM
– Sunday: 11AM – 6PM
– Monday: Closed
7. City Lights, San Francisco: Poetry and the Beats
Named after the Chaplin film, City Lights opened at 261 Columbus Avenue in 1953, founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin as the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States. Ever since its founding, its mission has been to create a public space for writers and poets, and it played a huge role in developing the San Francisco literary scene.
One stand-out example is when Ferlinghetti launched the Pocket Poets Series in 1955 and published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems in 1956. This was a controversial work at the time, deemed obscene, and police arrested the bookstore’s manager Shigeyoshi Murao for selling it. Ferlinghetti turned himself in on returning to the city, and the poem was ruled not obscene that autumn. For its contributions to local literature, San Francisco named the store a landmark in 2001. It stays open late, as it always has.
Address: 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco, CA 94133, United States
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 10AM – 10PM
8. The Drama Book Shop, New York: Theatre and Playwriting
Founded in 1917 by the Drama League and independent since 1923, the Drama Book Shop keeps over 8,000 plays in stock and received a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre in 2011. Its basement is where Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail worked on In the Heights.
When rent forced the shop out of its 40th Street home in January 2019, Miranda, Kail, Jeffrey Seller and James L. Nederlander bought it, with support from New York’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, and reopened it on West 39th Street in June 2021. In other words, a community rescued its own clubhouse.
Address: 266 W 39th St, New York, NY 10018, United States
Opening hours:
– Monday to Saturday: 10AM – 7PM
– Sunday: 12PM – 7PM
9. Librairie des Femmes, Paris: Books by, For, and About Women
Antoinette Fouque, a co-founder of France’s women’s liberation movement, launched the publishing house Éditions des Femmes with funding from Sylvina Boissonnas in 1972. It marked the first publishing house in Europe devoted to women’s writing and struggles. Its first books appeared in spring 1974, and the first Librairie des femmes opened alongside them.
Now at 35 Rue Jacob, the shop stocks political essays, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art books, fiction, and crime, all by, for or about women, plus the Bibliothèque des voix audiobook series, recorded by actresses including Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert. That’s right; not just a shelf. A whole shop.
Address: 33/35 Rue Jacob, 75006 Paris, France
Opening hours:
– Tuesday to Saturday: 11AM – 7PM
– Monday: 1PM – 7PM
– Sunday: Closed
What Specialists Know
A general bookshop’s gift is breadth: something for nearly everyone, all under one roof, and there is nothing faint about that praise. A specialist’s gift is different, and in its way rarer. It keeps faith with a single subject through the decades when nobody is asking, which is precisely how knowledge survives. The sea shop in Milan hoards charts for coastlines its customers may never sail. Printed Matter defended a medium the art market dismissed. City Lights went to court for a book of poems. None of it is comprehensive. All of it is devotion, and devotion, it turns out, outlasts inventory.
To seek out shops like these while travelling is a small act of world citizenship: 15 minutes with a bookseller who has spent 30 years on one subject teaches more about a city than a queue outside a monument. Bring cash, ask a question, buy what they recommend.
Being an old soul is not nostalgia. It is a willingness to be taught slowly, by someone who has dedicated themselves to a subject. Part two of this series brings five more places, each one certain that a single subject, followed far enough, becomes a whole world.
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K Lou
K. Lou is a writer born in the U.S. who found her way to Japan through a spiritual calling—or, more precisely, better access to tea. She writes about travel, culture, and the occasional creative piece, inspired by her enduring love of books. This love began in high school when K. Lou carried books around to avoid seeming odd while lost in thought. Once she started reading, she never stopped. With zero regrets, she continues to explore the written word and invites others to join her in celebrating its varied forms.
