thebookguide Home

Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in the UK and Republic of Ireland

thebookguide aims to list all the secondhand bookshops in the UK and the Republic of Ireland - all shops where books, the main or only stock, are available for visitors to browse.

Bookshop listings by area

We welcome comments, reviews and news of new shops and shop changes - see the posting guidelines

Contact thebookguide

About thebookguide

Ancient history

Going back more than seventy years, there have been book series that aimed to list the second-hand and antiquarian bookshops of Britain. Among the first was the Sheppard Press Dealers in Books series, 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 no longer list these on the main site, but fair and auction links are listed on our main listings page.

Our Facebook page also posts a monthly rundown of the latest reviews with shop photos.

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. Roger Blake preserved and hosted the site content and registered the domain thebookguide.info, and Jon Morgan listed the shops with submitted changes on our associated 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. Currently most of our reviews are submitted by a dedicated core group, some of whom cover much of the country on book-buying trips. We rely on our reviewers and users for the accuracy of the guide and their contributions are invaluable.

In 2024 the reviewer who modestly wishes to hide behind his username Booker T started to send in large numbers of new and unrecorded shops, greatly boosting the guide's completeness. Many he knew from past visiting; others he has discovered and researched, giving trustworthy and well-judged entries.

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.

Other thanks

Major thanks are due to Bytemark Hosting, now part of Iomart, who are sponsoring the hosting of this site, allowing it to be free of advertising and commercial exploitation of its visitors.

We also acknowledge the help of Let's Encrypt, Postcodes.io and OpenStreetMap, open source projects that add value to this and countless other websites.