I plan trips around bookstores the way others plan around restaurants. Not because I buy more books than I can carry (though I do), but because a city’s bookstores reveal its intellectual life — what it reads, what it preserves, what it celebrates, and what it hides on the upper floors.
These are the cities where literature is not a museum piece but a living geography.
1. Lisbon — the city that reads on terraces
Livraria Lello — the famous one. Art nouveau staircase, stained glass, the rumored inspiration for Flourish and Blotts. Go at opening (9 a.m.) or accept the queue as pilgrimage.
Ler Devagar — in LX Factory, a converted industrial space. Floor-to-ceiling shelves on multiple levels, cafe inside the store, the feeling of being inside someone’s beautiful obsession.
Lisbon’s street bookstalls — along Rua Garrett and in Chiado, outdoor stalls selling used books in Portuguese and English. The city’s real literary pulse.
Why Lisbon: Fado is literature set to music. Pessoa wrote at tables you can still sit at. The city treats reading as a public act.
2. Paris — the original literary capital
Shakespeare and Company — the English-language institution on the Left Bank. Sleeping beds for writers, cats, events, the weight of Hemingway and Joyce in the walls.
Librairie Galignani — oldest English-language bookstore in continental Europe (1801). Opposite the Tuileries. Old-world precision.
The bouquinistes — green boxes along the Seine. Used books, vintage posters, prints. The world’s most beautiful outdoor bookstore, permanent since the 17th century.
Why Paris: Every street has a novel in it. The city invented the literary cafe and has not stopped since.
3. Tokyo — Jimbocho, the book town
Jimbocho — an entire neighborhood of used bookstores. Hundreds of shops specializing in everything: ukiyo-e prints, academic texts, manga, first editions, maps. Kanda Used Book Festival each fall draws collectors from across Asia.
Tsutaya Books Daikanyama — the most beautiful bookstore in the world (a claim with competition, but valid). Three interconnected buildings, architecture by Klein Dytham, a design object that happens to sell books.
Why Tokyo: Japan reads more per capita than almost any nation. Jimbocho proves it is not just statistics — it is geography.
4. Buenos Aires — where bookstores outnumber Starbucks
El Ateneo Grand Splendid — a theater converted to a bookstore. Frescoed ceiling, stage as cafe, balconies lined with shelves. The most photographed bookstore on earth, and still worth it.
Buenos Aires has more bookstores per capita than any city in the world — over 700 at last count. Avenida Corrientes is lined with them, many open until midnight.
Why Buenos Aires: Borges. Cortázar. The city treats literature as national identity, not hobby.
5. Edinburgh — UNESCO City of Literature
Lighthouse Books — radical and independent, on West Nicolson Street. Armchair Books — West Port’s chaotic used bookshop, spilling onto the pavement. The Edinburgh International Book Festival — each August, the world’s largest public book festival transforms Charlotte Square.
Why Edinburgh: UNESCO’s first City of Literature. Home to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter (written in cafes you can visit), and a literary tradition that treats books as civic infrastructure.
6. Melbourne — the southern hemisphere’s book capital
Readings — Carlton’s independent institution, multiple locations, the bookstore that defines Australian literary culture. Hill of Content — Bourke Street, operating since 1922. The State Library of Victoria — not a bookstore but a temple — the La Trobe Reading Room is one of the great interior spaces on earth.
Why Melbourne: More live literature events per capita than any city outside London. Coffee culture meets book culture meets laneway culture.
7. Portland — Keep Portland Weird, Keep Reading
Powell’s City of Books — an entire city block. New and used, color-coded rooms, approximately one million books. You can get lost for a day and consider it time well spent.
Why Portland: Powell’s alone justifies the trip. The city’s identity is inseparable from independent book culture.
8. Hay-on-Wye — the village that is a bookstore
On the Welsh-English border, a town of 1,900 people with over forty bookshops. Founded as a book town by Richard Booth in 1961. The Hay Festival each May draws 100,000 visitors for literary talks in fields and tents.
Why Hay-on-Wye: Not a city — a proof of concept. An entire economy built on used books in a rural setting. Unique on earth.
9. Prague — the city of dissident literature
Ládví and the English-language bookshops of Malá Strana — Shakespeare and Sons (not Paris’s, a Prague institution), Globe Bookstore and Cafe.
The Kafka trail — the author’s city, preserved and transformed by literary tourism. The bookstores carry the weight of a culture that used literature as resistance.
10. Reykjavik — small city, serious readers
Mál og Menning — the main bookstore on Laugavegur, excellent English section, cafe upstairs. Bókabúð Forlagid — publisher’s bookstore with Icelandic and translated literature.
Why Reykjavik: Highest literacy rate in the world. A nation of 380,000 people that publishes and reads at the rate of countries ten times its size. The bookstores are modest in size but serious in intent.
How to travel as a reader
- Allocate time — a great bookstore cannot be browsed in twenty minutes
- Ask staff — independent bookstore employees are curators, not clerks
- Ship books home — pack an empty bag; fill it; post it
- Visit the cafe — the bookstore cafe is where literary travel happens
- Check event calendars — readings, signings, and festivals transform a visit
The case for literary travel
In an age of digital reading and algorithmic recommendation, the physical bookstore is an act of resistance — a space where you encounter books you did not search for, in a city that chose to preserve the building that holds them.
These cities understand that books are not products. They are geography — maps of interior worlds, shelved in exterior ones, waiting for the traveler who knows that the best souvenir is something you read on the journey home.
Field Notes is edited by Camille Laurent. Related: Reading Nook Design · Copenhagen Design City