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The 13 Best Bookshops in the World That Are Worth a Detour

Thirteen bookshops worth rerouting an entire trip for, from a converted Buenos Aires theater to a Lisbon shop older than most countries. The ones where the building is half the reason you came.

There are two kinds of travelers: those who plan around museums and those who quietly reroute a whole afternoon because a bookshop is three streets the wrong way. I am loudly the second kind. A great bookshop is a museum you’re allowed to touch, sit in, and leave with a piece of. Here are thirteen I’d genuinely change a transit plan for, ranked by how hard I’d fight to get there.

The Marylebone branch is an Edwardian shop with a long oak gallery and a stained-glass window at the back, and it shelves books by country instead of genre. Want to read about Peru? Here are the novels, the histories, and the guidebooks, all together. It’s the most useful layout ever invented and somehow the prettiest.

A six-floor white spiral inside a restored 19th-century building, all curved balconies and a glass roof. It looks like the inside of a seashell that decided to sell paperbacks. There’s a bistro on the top floor, which is the correct place to sit and pretend you’ll read all of it.

Founded by a group of friends who decided Oia needed a bookshop and just… built one. It’s tiny, scrawled with quotes on every beam, and it hangs off the caldera with one of the best sea views in Greece. The rooftop hosts readings at sunset. Worth the donkey-path walk.

Three floors with a dramatic central atrium and a spiral staircase, plus an espresso book machine that prints out-of-print titles on demand. It’s the rare big shop that still feels personal, with staff recommendation cards that are genuinely sharp rather than corporate.

The pivoting wooden door-shelves at the entrance are a small piece of theater, and the central void lets you peer between floors. It’s a modern shop that understands a bookstore should be a building you move through, not a warehouse you grab from.

Nine themed rooms, each decorated for its section: the cookery room has a suspended kitchen table, the travel room has a real vintage Fiat. It’s a bit much in the best way, and the restaurant tying it together means you can lose three hours easily.

A 700-year-old Gothic Dominican church converted into a bookshop, with a towering black steel bookcase climbing toward the vaulted ceiling. You browse under medieval frescoes. There’s a café in the old choir, in the shape of a cross. Reverent and slightly cheeky at once.

Yes, it’s famous and yes, it’s packed, but the Left Bank shop earns the line out front. The creaking floors, the reading nook upstairs, the beds tucked between shelves where traveling writers have slept for decades. Go early, before the queue, and sit by the river afterward.

The North Beach beat-poetry landmark still feels like a place where something matters. The poetry room upstairs is a pilgrimage, the basement is a warren, and the staff don’t perform indifference. It’s a working bookshop with a backbone, not a museum of itself.

The “bookshop of high water” stores its stock in bathtubs, a gondola, and waterproof bins because Venice floods. Out back there’s a staircase built entirely from water-damaged books that you climb for a canal view. Chaotic, soggy, completely unforgettable.

The Chiado branch is the oldest operating bookshop in the world, open since 1732 and certified by Guinness. The narrow blue-tiled rooms run back deeper than you expect, past a plaque-lined corridor of Portuguese writers. You’re shopping in a place that’s older than most of the countries you’ve visited.

The crimson serpentine staircase and stained-glass skylight are so dramatic that Porto charges admission (refundable against a purchase) just to manage the crowds. Get there at opening, look up at that ceiling, and understand why it’s on every list. Buy a book to make the ticket worth it.

A 1919 theater turned bookshop, with the original frescoed ceiling, gilded balconies, and crimson stage curtains still in place. You read in the old opera boxes. There’s a café on what was the stage. No bookshop on earth makes a stronger case that the building itself is worth the detour, and that’s the whole brief. Number one.

Which bookshop is most worth flying somewhere for? El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, if you want pure spectacle, or Bertrand in Lisbon if you care about history. Both are walkable from other things you’d want to see, so neither is a wasted trip.

Do these bookshops sell books in English? Most of the big ones do, especially Daunt, ABC Amsterdam, Shakespeare and Company, City Lights, and Lello. The smaller and older shops skew local-language, but you go to those for the room as much as the reading.

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