Circle the globe in search of the world’s 20 best bookshops, from Livraria Lello in Porto to El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires.
Jules Verne’s hero raced around the world and, famously, saw almost none of it. He crossed nations such as India, Japan and America with his eyes on his pocket watch, so focused on making time that the places blurred past the train windows. This journey is the exact opposite. Same globe, same spirit of adventure, but an entirely different wager: that the way to actually see the world is to stop, push open a door, and stand in the rooms where a city keeps its stories.
Because that is what a great bookshop is. It’s the most honest window into a culture you can find, showing you what a city really reads, argues about and dreams of, with no filter applied for visitors. It cannot be rushed. Nobody optimises your path through it. You browse without a search bar, you trust serendipity, and serendipity, far more often than you’d think, delivers.
So here is the itinerary. Twenty bookshops across four continents: a deconsecrated Gothic church, a barge on a London canal, a mirrored labyrinth in Chengdu, a theatre in Buenos Aires where tango legends once performed. There is no need to rush. The whole point is to lose track of time.
The journey starts, as all good journeys do, heading east.
Leg One: Asia
Where the adventure begins: five shops that treat reading as sanctuary, spectacle and, in one case, a reason to stay up all night.
TSUTAYA Bookstore Noritake Shinmachi, Nagoya, Japan
Tucked inside the Aeon Mall Noritake Garden, this two-storey store is built around a mirrored staircase and ceiling that turn a single wall of books into a soaring “infinity” bookshelf. It’s a kind of optical illusion that fills your camera roll.
Here, you will find a Starbucks attached to the building, built for soaking up the classic Japanese book-and-café tradition. Come for the photographs. Stay because nobody hurries you out, which in a shopping mall is its own small miracle.
Address: Japan, 〒451-0051 Aichi, Nagoya, Nishi Ward, Noritakeshinmachi, 3 Chome−1−１番１７号 イオンモール
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 10AM – 9PM
Dujiangyan Zhongshuge, Chengdu, China
The architects at X+Living, led by Li Xiang, used mirrored ceilings, glossy black-tile floors and sweeping arches to conjure something out of M.C. Escher, with roughly 80,000 volumes within reach. The design nods to the region’s ancient Dujiangyan irrigation system, a feat of engineering old enough to be legend.
The 1000 Libraries community placed Dujiangyan Zhongshuge sixth on its 2025 1000Libraries Awards list of the world’s ten most beautiful bookstores, and the photographs still don’t quite prepare you for standing inside it.
Address: China, Sichuan, Chengdu, Dujiangyan City, Yulei Rd, 玉玺路51 邮政编码: 611830
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 10AM – 9PM
The Sunway Library by BookXcess, Selangor, Malaysia
Opened in December 2025 at Sunway Square Mall, this maze of towering shelves from BookXcess is known for being Southeast Asia’s largest 24-hour bookstore, holding more than a million books.
The entire idea was based on a simple assumption: that people nowadays are overwhelmed by screens and simply want to spend more time offline. The midnight crowds that gathered here proved the co-founder right. There is something quietly radical about a bookstore that assumes you might need a novel at 3 am, and turns out to be correct.
Address: L2-19, Level 2, Sunway SQ Mall, Jalan Lagoon Selatan, Bandar Sunway, 47500 Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia
Opening hours:
– 24 hours open daily
ARC·N·BOOK, Seoul, South Korea
Famous for its arched tunnels built from stacked books, this curated shop in Yeouido’s TP Tower organises its sections around daily life, style and inspiration rather than conventional genres. It shares its space with Jukdang, a dessert café serving modern takes on traditional Korean sweets. Reading here is treated as a whole lifestyle rather than a transaction, and Seoul’s readers have responded accordingly.
Address: 96 Uisadang-daero, Yeongdeungpo District, Seoul, South Korea
Opening hours:
– Monday to Friday: 7:30AM – 9PM
– Saturday & Sunday: 10AM – 9PM
B2S Think Space Eastville, Bangkok, Thailand
Opened in 2016 across more than 3,000 square metres, with over 100,000 books and five zones for reading, working and connecting, Think Space was designed from the start as a “third place.” Not home, not work, somewhere better than both. Skylights, bleached wood and small patches of greenery frame a Starbucks Reserve. It’s a suburban sanctuary for a city that badly needed one.
Address: 2/5 On La-iat Alley, Lat Phrao, Bangkok 10230, Thailand
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 10AM – 10PM
Leg Two: Europe
Westward now, into the old European world, where bookshops occupy churches, banks, barges and covered passages, and where some of them predate the countries around them.
Livraria Lello, Porto, Portugal
Opened in 1906, Lello is the neo-Gothic and Art Nouveau landmark by which all beautiful bookshops are measured, defined by its sweeping crimson staircase and stained-glass skylight. Entry to Livraria Lello is by timed ticket, redeemable against a book, which tells you everything about the queues.
A piece of literary trivia: J.K. Rowling lived in Porto in the early 1990s, and visitors often link the bookshop to Harry Potter. Although the connection is not officially confirmed, its striking interior has made it a pilgrimage site for fans.
Address: R. das Carmelitas 144, 4050-161 Porto, Portugal
Opening hours:
– Monday to Friday: 9:30AM – 6:30PM
– Saturday & Sunday: Closed
Boekhandel Dominicanen, Maastricht, Netherlands
A Dominican church consecrated in 1294 reopened as a bookstore in 2006, and Dominicanen may be the most persuasive argument anywhere for adaptive reuse. Books rise in steel stacks beneath soaring Gothic vaults and a 14th-century fresco of Thomas Aquinas, while a café sits in the former chancel, where the altar once stood. Time Out crowned it the most beautiful bookstore in the world in 2025. Seven centuries of quiet, still in use.
Address: Dominicanerkerkstraat 1, 6211 CZ Maastricht, Netherlands
Opening hours:
– 24 hours open daily
The Gently Mad, Edinburgh, Scotland
A short stroll from the Botanic Garden, The Gently Mad was opened in 2012 by Rab Mullin, soon joined by his son Baz. Upstairs, it’s a quirky family shop trading in second-hand and antiquarian treasures. Downstairs is the real secret: a working bookbindery and restoration workshop, where old volumes are sewn, pressed and gilded back to life by hand. In a city of grand literary monuments, this is the humbler thing- a place where books are not just sold but repaired.
Address: 2 Summer Pl, Edinburgh EH3 5NR, United Kingdom
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 11AM – 5:30PM
Word on the Water, London, England
A floating bookshop aboard the Dianti, a century-old Dutch barge moored on Regent’s Canal at King’s Cross. For years Word on the Water was forced to move every fortnight under canal rules, a bookshop permanently on the run, until it won a permanent mooring in 2015. Now it keeps browsers warm with a wood stove in winter and puts poets and jazz musicians on the roof in summer. London’s most persistent bookshop, in every sense.
Address: Regent’s Canal Towpath, London N1C 4LW, United Kingdom
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 12PM – 7PM
Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice, Italy
Opened in 2004 by Luigi Frizzo, the name means “high water,” and the shop’s genius is that it stopped fighting Venice’s floods and started collaborating with them. Books are stacked inside bathtubs, and a full-sized gondola; a legendary staircase built from water-damaged volumes climbs to a canal view; cats sit on top of the stock. National Geographic counts it among the most beautiful bookshops in the world, which feels almost beside the point. It’s certainly the most Venetian.
Address: C. Longa Santa Maria Formosa, 5176b, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 9AM – 7:10PM
Cărturești Carusel, Bucharest, Romania
A former Chrissoveloni family bank in the Old Town, reborn in 2015 after a five-year restoration. Carusel rises through six luminous white floors that curve around a central atrium beneath a skylight, with a plant-filled bistro at the top. Bucharest has spent decades rebuilding its relationship with its own architecture, and this is one of the happiest results. A building that once held money now holds something that appreciates differently.
Address: Strada Lipscani 55, 030033 București, Romania
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 10AM – 10PM
Librairie Jousseaume, Paris, France
Trading since 1826 in the glass-roofed Galerie Vivienne, Jousseaume is one of the oldest bookshops still operating in Paris. The Jousseaume family took it over in 1890 and still runs it, across two shops that face each other in the passage, both brimming with antiquarian finds. The mosaic floors, the iron and glass overhead, the stacked spines within: this is the 19th-century Paris of the imagination, except it’s real and it’s open six days a week.
Address: 45-46-47 Gal Vivienne, 75002 Paris, France
Opening hours:
– Monday to Saturday: 11AM – 7PM
– Sunday: Closed
Atlantis Books, Firostefani, Santorini, Greece
Founded in 2004 by friends from the US and UK who arrived on Santorini, found no bookshop, and decided that was unacceptable, Atlantis was born. The must-visit Greek island bookstore spent two decades in a cave-like house in Oia, a unique setting that helped earn it a place on National Geographic’s list of the world’s top ten bookstores. It then relocated along the caldera to Firostefani in 2024 and traded the warren for the view. On this island, that’s a fair swap, and the spirit made the move intact.
Address: Nomikos Conference Centre, Firostefani 847 00, Greece
Opening hours:
– Monday to Sunday: 10:30AM – 8PM
Miguel Miranda, Madrid, Spain
A true antiquarian shop founded in 1949, Miguel Miranda was once a gathering place for intellectuals on Prado Street, now settled on Calle de Lope de Vega in the literary Barrio de las Letras. It sits directly across from the tomb of Cervantes, which for a Spanish bookshop is roughly the equivalent of holy ground. The founder’s grandson runs it today. Some businesses are handed down; this one reads like it was entrusted.
Address: C. de Lope de Vega, 19, Centro, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Opening hours:
– Monday to Friday: 10AM – 4PM
– Saturday & Sunday: Closed
Leg Three: The Americas
Across the Atlantic, where the New World keeps reinventing what a bookshop can be: a café, a theatre, an embassy, a rescue mission, a bar.
Cafebrería El Péndulo Condesa, Mexico City, Mexico
The original branch of El Péndulo opened in La Condesa in 1993 and gave Spanish a new word in the process: cafebrería, café plus librería. Literature, greenery, records and live music can be found throughout the space, and the shop has always considered itself a cultural centre first and a store second. Three decades on, half the bookshops in this guide are chasing the model El Péndulo built.
Address: Av. Nuevo León 115, Colonia Condesa, Cuauhtémoc, 06140 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico
Opening hours:
– Monday to Saturday: 8AM – 11PM
– Sunday: 9AM – 10PM
El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires, Argentina
A 1919 theatre with ceiling frescoes by the Italian painter Nazareno Orlandi, where Carlos Gardel once recorded, converted into a bookstore in 2000 with the original décor preserved down to the gilt. The theatre boxes are now reading nooks. The stage holds a café. The crimson curtain still hangs.
National Geographic named it the world’s most beautiful bookstore, and on a weekday morning, when the light comes through and someone is reading alone in a box seat, the title is hard to argue with.
Address: Av. Sta. Fe 1860, C1123 Cdad. Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Opening hours:
– Monday to Saturday: 9AM – 9PM
– Sunday: 12AM – 9PM
Albertine Books, New York City, USA
Opened in 2014 inside the landmark Payne Whitney mansion on Fifth Avenue, home since 1952 to the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Albertine is New York’s only bookshop devoted to French and English texts side by side. More than 14,000 titles from 30 French-speaking countries sit beneath a hand-painted celestial ceiling of deep blue and gold. It is, quite deliberately, a small piece of France that never requires a boarding pass.
Address: 972 5th Ave, New York, NY 10075, United States
Opening hours:
– Thursday to Tuesday: 10AM – 6PM
– Wednesday, Saturday & Sunday: Closed
Parnassus Books, Nashville, USA
Established in 2011 by the novelist Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes after Nashville lost its last major bookstore, Parnassus is an argument for community made flesh. The author events are loved by everyone, the staff recommendations carry real weight, and a roster of resident shop dogs greets you at the door. When people say a famous author saved bookselling in her city, they mean this shop, and they’re not exaggerating.
Address: 3900 Hillsboro Pike #14, Nashville, TN 37215, United States
Opening hours:
– Monday to Saturday: 10AM – 6PM
– Sunday: 12PM – 6PM
Joie de livres, Montreal, Canada
Founded in 2025 by sisters Sylvie and Claire Trottier, Joie de livres is a bilingual bookstore, café and bar in Mile End. It puts romance and speculative fiction at the centre of the shelf, treating the so-called guilty pleasures as tools for connection and community.
Joie de livres is the newest entry on this list by some distance, and a heartening one. Proof that in 2026, people are still opening bookshops, and building them around joy.
Address: 5163 Boul. Saint-Laurent, Montréal, QC H2T 1R9, Canada
Opening hours:
– Sunday to Wednesday: 9AM – 9PM
– Thursday to Saturday: 9AM – 11PM
The Final Port: Oceania
Every circumnavigation needs a last landfall. Ours is a defiant little shop at the bottom of the world.
The Paperback Bookshop, Melbourne, Australia
On Bourke Street since the mid-1960s, The Paperback was founded to make paperbacks freely available to readers, including titles then banned under Australia’s strict censorship laws. That took nerve. The shop stays open late into the night, and it endures as a small, fierce keeper of the freedom to read in a UNESCO City of Literature. Every city on this list should be so lucky.
Address: 60 Bourke St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia
Opening hours:
– Monday to Thursday: 9:30AM – 10PM
– Friday: 9:30AM – 11PM
– Saturday: 11AM – 11PM
– Sunday: 11AM – 12PM
The Wager, Settled
Phileas Fogg came home with an empty wallet, a new wife, and the discovery that he had gained a day without noticing. Travel by bookshop and the winnings are better. You come home with a suitcase that no longer closes, a head full of rooms, and the settled conviction that the world is larger, stranger, and more generous than the itinerary suggested.
You don’t have to visit all twenty to collect. Each of these shops is a small act of defiance against a fast, frictionless world: a wager that people still want to gather, browse, be surprised, and hold a thing made of paper and ink. To love bookshops is to be a citizen of everywhere. So pick a port. Push open the door. Somewhere out there, a shelf is holding your next adventure, and it has all the time in the world.
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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.
