The London Lounge

I will be in London for a couple of days next week. I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions for bookstores, preferably academic level bookstores?

Wanderer

Try Foyles on Charing Cross Road. For a less academic but more genteel experience, Hatchards on Piccadilly is a joy.

Also Daunt books on Marylebone High St. Primarily a travel book specialist but also good for history and biography. Or the giant Waterstones on Picadilly, a couple of doors down from Hatchards mentioned above.

My favourite bookshop though is Amazon.

Foyles is wonderful, but book lovers must exercise extreme caution. You might think you're just going to pop in for ten minutes, but when you eventually stagger out you find years have passed and your heirs are fighting over your estate.

Huzir

Waterstones in Gower Street claims to be Europe's largest academic bookshop.
http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesw ... eID=200006

All the others mentioned are good plus Stanfords for maps etc. Waterstones Piccadilly is very big and has good stock. Hatchards is particularly good for signed copies of books. Foyles is a great institution and I am surprised that Waterstones on Gower St claims to be bigger. If you are at Gower St the British Library is not a million miles away.

culverwood wrote:Waterstones in Gower Street claims to be Europe's largest academic bookshop.
http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesw ... eID=200006

All the others mentioned are good plus Stanfords for maps etc. Waterstones Piccadilly is very big and has good stock. Hatchards is particularly good for signed copies of books. Foyles is a great institution and I am surprised that Waterstones on Gower St claims to be bigger. If you are at Gower St the British Library is not a million miles away.

The Bloomsbury Waterstones used to be Dillons (why do they mess with these things?) and I should say that it has many more academic titles than Foyles but, as a bookshop, until it was recently overtaken, Foyles remaioned the biggest bookshop in the world - but I have always found it difficult to find things in there and the staff are just not in the same league as those at Hatchard's and the Bloomsbury Waterstones.
NJS

To my mind, London's finest bookshop is John Sandoe (link) in Blacklands Terrace, off the Kings Road in Chelsea. A wafer thin second to second to Sandoe is the London Review Bookshop (link) in Bloomsbury.

Browsing in either for an hour will surpass any comparable experience in Waterstones or Amazon.

Agree about Sandoe, LRB shop, Foyle's, and Hatchard's along with the many odd specialist booksellers such as Persephone Books in Lamb's Conduit Street and the crowd around Charing Cross Road and Bloomsbury, along with the rare/antiquarian booksellers such as Quaritch, etc.

But in honor of our shared interest it really is worth pausing a moment to appreciate the building at 203-206 Piccadilly, now the flagship Waterstones, once the splendid home of Simpsons of Piccadilly. A historically significant art deco structure built to house the firm that invented the Daks-top trouser and which for decades produced well-made menswear (including bespoke in the early days). It also, in its decline, indirectly spawned the sitcom "Are You Being Served?" I'm sure some of our English members will have memories of the firm in happier days.

The top floor cafe is not too bad, with nice views, but after touring the building and its once-innovative natural lighting, I'd recommend a stroll down the street to the Wolseley, another (earlier) deco treasure that has been re-purposed to much better effect.

Last year in one of the bookshops around Charing Cross I picked up a delightful corporate history of Simpsons, including several illustrations from golden-age ads, some of which compare not unfavorably to the work of Fellowes, Saalburg & co.

Hatchards is a must for me when I'm in London. Not a bookstore per se but the book fair on the South Bank underneath Waterloo Bridge sometimes has a nice selection. I'm re-reading a Agatha Christie I bought there a few years ago.

If it's London of the UK, you won't find any bookstores. You'll find plenty of bookshops, though
(I'm just assuming that you aren't going to London, Texas).

Actually, Oxfam is (one of) the best. Nowhere else is there such supply, stack upon stack, of well-bound, leather covered books (always buy real cloth or leather cover, sewn not glued spine). Regarding academic books, it really depends what subjects you are into. I have found Waterstones to stock everything I need in classics, literature, and philosophy, but nothing in maths or theology. They are also very poor with middle period or foreign books (all translated).