Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in the UK and Republic of Ireland
About thebookguide
Ancient history
Going back at least seventy years, there have been book series that
aimed to list the second-hand and antiquarian bookshops of Britain.
Among the first were the Sheppard Press Dealers in Books, which
appeared in new editions every few years. Skoob Books issued a similar
directory in seven editions between 1987 and 2000. Probably
best-known, if not notorious, are the several editions of Drif(f)'s
Guide, a deliberately chaotic, scurrilous and often very funny book
recording the author's love of books and hatred of the book trade,
or at least significant parts and aspects of it. The last edition
of Drif's Guide appeared in 1995 and since then he has been elusive.
(As chance would have it, days after writing this I bumped into and
chatted to Drif - surely a good omen for the site.)
The original site
thebookguide was launched in 2001 by Mike Goodenough 'in the spirit of
Drif' as a listing of the second-hand and antiquarian bookshops of the
UK and the Republic of Ireland. It also listed book fairs, book
auctions and bookbinders. We'd like to include these on this site at a
future date, but for now book fairs are listed on our Facebook page.
Mike maintained the site over nearly twenty years but closed it in March
2020, making the content available to anyone who would continue it in
some form. Since then Roger Blake has preserved and hosted the site
content and registered the domain thebookguide.info, and Jon Morgan has
listed the shops with submitted changes on his Facebook page.
The new site
This site aims to include Mike, Roger and Jon's work and acknowledges
their help and contributions, plus the reviews submitted by many users
over the years, some of whom have visited and reported on a large
proportion of the hundreds of shops listed. Thanks are also due to
Laurence Purcell for proofreading and Chris Harte for submitting updates
for the whole of Wales.
The listing content is being gradually updated from the state Mike left
it but many post-lockdown changes still unrecorded. We hope rapidly to
bring them up to date, with our readers' help.
The site needed a new interface to restore the interactive elements.
Users of the old site could submit comments on a bookshop, and could
submit new shops and changes to existing shops, and this has been
reinstated.
The twenty-year-old layout has been redesigned to take advantage of
new larger screens and to allow better display on smartphones.
Major thanks are due to
Bytemark Hosting who are sponsoring the hosting of
this site, allowing it to be free of advertising and commercial
exploitation of its visitors.
