The Best Book Markets in the World

Every great city has a place where its books wash up. Estates are broken, libraries are culled, readers die or move house, and somewhere a dealer with a trestle table catches what falls. Spend enough time in these places and you learn to read them like weather: the boxes on a Paris quay, the Friday stalls on an Amsterdam square, the shaded courtyard in Istanbul where the trade has continued, in one form or another, since Byzantium.

A book market is the opposite of the airport bookshop. Nothing is ranked, nothing is new, and the algorithm is a person, usually one who has spent forty years developing opinions and is delighted to share them. You go in looking for nothing in particular. You come out with a 1962 field guide to Mediterranean birds, inscribed to someone named Margit, and you will never part with it.

Here are eleven of the world’s best, and the stories that built them.

Where to Find the World’s Top Book Markets

1. Les Bouquinistes, Paris, France

Start where the whole idea began. Booksellers have traded on the banks of the Seine since the 16th century, and today roughly 240 bouquinistes work from about 900 of the signature green boxes, holding some 300,000 books, prints and postcards between them. The boxes are sturdier than they look, and braver too.

During the Second World War they served as secret letterboxes for the French Resistance, and in 2019 the trade was formally added to France’s inventory of intangible cultural heritage. When organisers proposed clearing the stalls ahead of the 2024 Olympic opening ceremony, the outcry was fierce enough that President Macron stepped in personally to preserve them. 

Even the City of Paris describes its relationship with the bouquinistes as a love story. Parisians have a line about all this, and it is well earned: the Seine is the only river in the world that runs between two bookshelves.

Address: face 53 Quai des Grands Augustins, 75006 Paris, France

2. Jimbōchō, Tokyo, Japan

Turn off Tokyo’s roaring avenues into Jimbōchō and the noise simply drops away. The district takes its name from Nagaharu Jimbo, a samurai who lived here in the late 1600s, and it now holds about a third of all Japan’s second-hand booksellers. Many consider it the largest used-book quarter on earth. Its survival is quite miraculous. While firebombing flattened much of wartime Tokyo, these streets were largely spared, allowing the neighbourhood’s historic buildings and its soul to stay intact.

There’s quite a mix of prices in Jimbōchō, from paperbacks at a few hundred yen to rarities in the tens of thousands. When you arrive, do as the locals do. Order a plate of curry, the neighbourhood’s other great obsession, then take a Viennese coffee at Ladrio, a kissaten that has been fuelling readers since 1949.

Address: Chiyoda City, Tokyo 101-0051 Japan

3. Southbank Centre Book Market, London, UK

Duck under Waterloo Bridge on the Queen’s Walk and you’ll find London browsing in the half-light, rain or shine. The bridge is the roof, which makes this one of the few outdoor book markets anywhere that never closes for weather. The market opened on the 2nd of July 1983 as the brainchild of Leslie Hardcastle, then controller of the BFI, who wanted to bring life to the gloomy space beneath the bridge. It eventually became part of the Southbank Centre in 2001. 

The traders assumed the arrangement was temporary. Four decades on, some of them are still there, presiding over tables of classics, comics, antiquarian maps and historic prints. Ask them anything. The knowledge behind those tables is half the treasure.

Address: Waterloo Brg, London SE1 8TX, United Kingdom

4. Cuesta de Moyano, Madrid, Spain

On the gentle slope beside Madrid’s Botanical Gardens, around 30 wooden stalls have remained since 1925. This is the largest permanent open-air book fair in Europe and, as of 2025, a centenarian. The writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna nicknamed Cuesta de Moyano the Feria del boquerón, the anchovy fair, because in those days a book cost about the same as an anchovy. 

Statues of the novelist Pío Baroja and the education reformer Claudio Moyano stand guard at either end. Since 2021, the fair has formed part of Madrid’s UNESCO-listed “Landscape of Light.” The columnist Paco Umbral called it the most-read street in Madrid. The booksellers’ own association, Soy de la Cuesta, keeps it that way, one out-of-print treasure at a time.

Address: Retiro, 28014 Madrid, Spain

5. Sahaflar Çarşısı, Istanbul, Türkiye

Slip out of the Grand Bazaar’s commotion and into a shaded courtyard where cats nap between the shelves. A book and paper market has operated roughly on this spot since Byzantine times. Under the Ottomans, it became a gathering place for scholars and a hub of the book trade itself. A bust in the courtyard honours İbrahim Müteferrika, who founded the first Ottoman printing press in the 1720s, a genuine revolution in a culture that had until then copied its books by hand.

The market settled into its present home beside the Beyazıt Mosque after a catastrophic earthquake that hit Istanbul in1894. It remains what it has been for centuries: a pocket of hush in a loud old city.

Address: No:, Molla Fenari, Medrese Çk. No:4, 34120 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye

6. Spui Book Market, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Time your Amsterdam visit for a Friday, when about 25 booksellers set up on Spui square with old, rare, and out-of-print volumes in Dutch, English, French, and German. This is a fussy market in the best sense. Sellers are vetted, each carries a speciality, and quality decisively beats quantity. 

While you’re in the neighbourhood, walk a few minutes east to the covered Oudemanhuispoort passage, where book stalls have traded since the 18th century. Even the greatVincent van Gogh bought books there and recorded his purchases. For the rest of the city’s bookish corners, see our own Book Lover’s Guide to Amsterdam.

Address: Spui, 1012 WV Amsterdam, Netherlands

7. Marché du Livre Georges Brassens, Paris, France

Paris’s second great book haunt hides in the quiet 15th arrondissement, and its setting is one of the strangest in the trade. Since 1987, the weekend market has operated beneath two 19th-century iron halls that once belonged to the Vaugirard horse abattoirs. Look up at the monumental gates, and you’ll find them still crowned with a horse and two bulls. 

The market is named after  Georges Brassens, the beloved singer-songwriter who lived nearby. It is only held on weekends, where books go for a few euros, and the adjoining park has a small working vineyard. This is Paris after all.

Address: 104 Rue Brancion, 75015 Paris, France

8. The Honesty Bookshop at Hay Castle, Hay-on-Wye, Wales, UK

The purest book market in Britain has no till and no staff. In the grounds of Hay Castle, a Norman fortress rising above the world’s first book town, weathered shelves of second-hand books stand in the open air year-round. You choose your book, you drop your coins in the honesty box, and you walk away. That’s the entire transaction. Rain, frost and the occasional sheep are the only security.

The idea carries the fingerprints of Richard Booth, the bookseller who bought the crumbling castle in the early 1960s. He filled the town below with bookshops, and on 1 April 1977 declared Hay an independent kingdom with himself as king and his horse as prime minister. The stunt made world headlines and helped launch the global book town movement. 

The castle has since been rescued and restored by the Hay Castle Trust, reopening to the public in 2022, but the honesty shelves remain gloriously unimproved: sun-faded spines, hand-painted price signs, and the quiet thrill of a purchase conducted entirely on trust. Time your visit for the Hay Festival, and you can watch a town of 1,500 people, holding an estimated 10 million books, briefly become the centre of the literary world.

Address: 44 Lion St, Hay-on-Wye, Hereford HR3 5AA, United Kingdom

9. Nguyen Van Binh Book Street, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Turn off the motorbike-choked boulevards of District 1 and the engines simply vanish. That sudden quiet is the street’s first gift. Opened in January 2016 as Vietnam’s first dedicated book street, this roughly 100-metre pedestrian lane runs between the Saigon Central Post Office and the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica, beneath the shade of old tamarind trees. 

A stone sculpture titled Thinking greets you at the entrance, and benches invite you to sit rather than pass through. Most of the entries on this list survived history. This pick from our Vietnam book lover’s guide was built on purpose, proof that a fast-modernising megacity can decide, deliberately, to make room for reading.

Address: 2 Đ. Nguyễn Văn Bình, Sài Gòn, Hồ Chí Minh 700000, Vietnam

10. Bart’s Books, Ojai, California, USA

Not strictly a market, but perhaps the purest expression of the market spirit in America. Bart’s began in 1964 when Richard Bartindale, inspired by the bouquinistes’ carts along the Seine, stacked his overflowing collection on the sidewalk and left coffee cans on top for payment. The trust became the institution. 

Today the world’s largest outdoor bookstore holds more than 100,000 titles. The shelves along its exterior wall still sell books on the honour system 24 hours a day, with coins dropped through a slot in the door. Ojai’s dry, sun-baked climate allows the stock to live happily in the open air, under pergolas and blue sky. A bookshop with weather.

Address: 302 W Matilija St, Ojai, CA 93023, United States

11. Brattle Book Shop, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

The same treasure-hunt thrill, wrapped in two centuries of history. Founded in Boston’s Cornhill district in 1825, the Brattle is one of America’s oldest and largest antiquarian bookshops, run by the Gloss family since 1949. The beating heart of this location is the open-air sale lot beside the shop, where thousands of bargain books can be found in a mural-flanked courtyard. The family flair for spectacle appears to be genetic. 

In 1969, owner George Gloss rode a horse-drawn wagon through Boston, tossing free books to the crowd and shouting “Go West!” toward the shop’s new home on West Street. His son Ken runs it today, appraising rare books for institutions ranging from Harvard to, on occasion, the FBI.

Address: 9 West St, Boston, MA 02111, United States

The Traveller’s True Souvenir

What links a green box on the Seine, a cat-guarded courtyard in Istanbul and a coin dropped in a box at a Welsh castle isn’t commerce. It’s trust. The honesty shelf, the stranger’s recommendation, the seller who says, “Leave that one; take this instead,” and turns out to be right. The world’s book market asks you to browse without a plan and buy without a review, which is a rare kind of open-mindedness at a human pace. So wander slowly. Talk to the seller. And always, always leave room in your bag for something special.