Spendthrift

The Best Bookshops in Melbourne: Our Top 5

Few Melburnians know that they live in a city honoured with the second UNESCO City of Literature mantle. Yet it’s one of the (MANY!) things to love about this city – that the fact that we live in a City of Literature so commonly goes unnoticed. Well, that, and the fact the we actually ARE a UNESCO City of Literature!

Here are some stats to justify the title:

  • 43% of all book sales in Australia are generated here. I knew there was a good reason I love this city.
  • Melbourne is home to some of Australia’s best writers, include Marcus Clarke, Peter Carey, Helen Garner, Christos Tsiolkas, and Nam Le – among plenty others.
  • Almost a third of all Aussie writers reside in Melbourne
  • Melbourne’s State Library of Victoria was the first major cultural institution to be built in the city after its founding in 1854. Looks to me like they had their priorities right. It now receives over 1.5 million visitors every year.

But enough of that. That’s not what you’re reading this article for, is it? So here it is, some of the best bookshops in Melbourne:

Best Bookshops in Melbourne

In honour of this festival, I did my own little bookshop hunt around Melbourne (the things I do for my readers) in search of the city’s best independent bookstores. For a start, a wonderful bookshop should have:

  • An amazing selection across many genres
  • Reasonable prices
  • Ambience
  • Interesting or unusual décor
  • Quirky and rare books (secondhand and new)

On those grounds, here are my top five Best Bookshops in Melbourne.

1. Reader’s Feast

162 Collins Street Melbourne

Maybe it was early morning enthusiasm that keeps the Reader’s Feast in my top five selection, but its atmosphere and elegance resonated long after I’d left the store.

Entering Reader’s Feast elicited one of those “Wow” moments that can be rare in your own city. It should have been a telltale sign that its location on the Parisian-esque Collins Street would influence its design and decor. But I was still unprepared for the sweeping velvet-carpeted double staircase leading to its glamorous glass entry.

best bookshop-in melbourne-readers-feast

NB: all entryways into bookstores should be lined with red velvet carpet.

Classical music welcomes you inside – otherwise, a reverential silence reigns. Perfect.

As always, I beelined to the Classics & Literature section and delighted in its range of unusual book titles I’d never heard of from authors I adored. And right next to my cherished section were antiquated leather chairs that seemed to come straight out of Mr Darcy’s library. Perfection completed.

best-melbourne-bookshop-readers-feast

But if Reader’s Feast is too mainstream for your liking, you can always pop into the kooky, pokey Kay Craddock Antiquarian Booksellers situated right beside Reader’s Feast. Though it was sadly closed on the Sunday I was there, this little gem in a Gothic building looked enticing to explore at a later date.

2. Robinson’s Bookshop

Shop 3001, Emporium Melbourne

Perhaps I’m biased. OK, there’s no “perhaps” to it. When it comes to Robinson’s Bookshop, I am most certainly biased.

This little bookshop has its roots in my (now) hometown of Frankston. There naysayers, Frankston does have a gem or two. I’ve been visiting it for birthdays and Christmases ever since I moved into the area.

But it does have the credentials to hold its own: it’s the oldest general independent bookshop in Victoria. And anyway, who can argue with this delightful façade:

best-bookshop-in-melbourne-robinsons

Robinson’s Bookshop is moving up in the world, and this treasure can be found in Melbourne’s newest and plushest shopping hub, The Emporium. (Fine, the location isn’t particularly inspiring, but if you’re in doubt of its worthiness in the Top 5 list, I beseech you to look once more at the picture above. Not won over? How about the interior):

robinsons-bookshop-cabinet-in-melbourne

Dark timber graces the floorboards and the shelves, which are lined with classics, modern Lit, recipe books; hell, there’s even a Comic Book section.

In my experience with Robinson’s, you can order the most obscure of titles and they’ll search the world over for it. Plus their latest “Blind Date” series of lucky dip books is such a novel idea (excuse the pun).

blind-date-books-in-melbourne

3. Embiggen Books

197-203 Little Lonsdale Street.

It is opposite the aforementioned State Library. Need I say more? Yes? It’s got a ladder. There.

ladder-in-melbourne-bookshop

Embiggen Books is filled with bizarre regalia to complement their book displays. Exhibit A:

best-bookshops-in-melbourne-displays

They’re kooky and unassuming, but still deferential towards those bound paper pages. You have to be when you’re that close to the State Library. It’s small but cosy and there are sections to entertain aficionados of just about anything.

4. Hill of Content Bookshop

86 Bourke Street

Moving away from the city centre, I walked the short distance up Bourke Street, towards one of my favourite streets in Melbourne: Spring Street. Just before hitting that regal and presidential strip, I found Hill of Content. And I discovered the reason behind its nomenclature: bliss.

interior-of-hills-of-content

There are two floors. I love two floors in a bookshop. It keeps you quivering with anticipation and trying to exercise restraint by thoroughly familiarising yourself with ground-floor content before ascending.

The anticipation is deserved. The second floor seems to have an endless classics range showing a respectable effort to find the most unheard-of titles by well known authors. Try this one: Hunted Down: the Detective Stories of Charles Dickens. Say what? That one’s going on the wishlist.

What made this perfection complete? As I browsed, I heard from outside the clip clop of horse hooves from passing tourist carriage rides. And it was as if I had been transported to Dickens’s world.

interior-best-bookshops-in-melbourne

5. The Paperback Bookshop

60 Bourke Street.

Hill of Content and the Paperback Bookshop are so close together they’re practically nudging each other for space. That may be an exaggeration. But they’re close.

one-of-best-bookshops-in-melbourne

The shop is so petite and well-stocked there was barely room to breathe, let alone provide a small reading nook. But who can mark a bookshop down for having too many books?

best-bookshops-in-melbourne-bookshelves

You know those teetering piles of books that fill you with envy in our most beloved fictional bookshop, Flourish and Blotts? I found them. Here.

book-stacks-best-bookshops-in-melbourne

The Paperback is filled with brand new books on bookshelves so rudimentary you’ll think they’re second hand. They’re not. And they’re going at brand-new prices too (read, not-second hand). It was a minor let down, but this shop was just too cute to deny a Top 5 spot. One more look…

the-paperback-best-bookshop-in-melbourne

Melbourne is replete with hidden bookshops, so to narrow the list to five was hard work and I’ve probably displeased more than a few of you by leaving out your favourite. Where do you go to buy books in Melbourne? Write your top picks in the Comments section below or visit my Facebook page for ongoing discussions.

Or if this doesn’t satiate your appetite, make sure to put the Clunes Booktown Festival on your calendar to find all the books you need in one place!

You Might Also Like

No Comments

Leave a Reply
http://manymelbournes.com/best-bookshops-in-melbourne/
manymelbournes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-05
80437
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:F2IMDFZR5CNPE5XTV4KAXRMEPX5YLKDQ
<urn:uuid:f7a8cdae-73ed-4b99-9b69-901d15b1f614>
2018-01-21T04:20:32Z
146.66.91.86
text/html
sha1:EJMIC5EOXMNC5FDQVE4ONXWMAYS47XXS
<urn:uuid:5ca32a8a-8972-4cb7-b159-6466ffec17a8>
http://manymelbournes.com/best-bookshops-in-melbourne/
response
<urn:uuid:230bfcc9-b8bf-43ae-a1e8-8a502521ca0c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-146-219-137.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-05
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf