About The Guide

Hello! We are Sonja and Ivan. And this is our Bookstore Guide - an amateur guide to book shopping throughout Europe. We hope this Guide will help you find the book(stores) you are looking for. Unfortunately, the bookstores are no longer uploaded and may be out of date

Bookstore Guide Turns 5...


Bookstore Guide has been around for exactly five years... When we started the blog back in 2007 we had little idea if there were more people out there who enjoyed visiting local bookstores when traveling and who were eager to refill their backpacks with some fresh reading material. During the past five years you've made it perfectly clear that Bookstore Guide has found its own audience and thanks to you, we have discovered many great bookstores all over Europe.

We've also gotten in touch with many interesting people and started several online friendships with fellow booklovers. Working on Bookstore Guide also helped us find the inspiration and courage to start our own bookstore in Bratislava, 11th Floor Books.

This period has been quite difficult for independent bookstores and we also hope that a mention in the Guide has helped some of them spread the word about their existence and has brought in new customers. Initially, many of the bookstores didn't even have their own website and the post on Bookstore Guide was pretty much their only online presence.

Here's a quick test if you belong to newer visitors or if you're familiar with the Guide for some time. If you remember this picture (it was on the site up to September 2008) than you're a part of the old gang...
bookstore guide old pic

Over the years the Guide has grown from post number one (The American Book Center in Amsterdam) to include 243 bookstores in 103 European cities. According to data from Google Analytics, the site has attracted almost half a million visitors who logged in from all the countries in the world except for five countries in central Africa and North Korea. Besides regular posts about bookstores, we've also added some new sections. We started off with writing Reports from our bookstore hunting trips to bigger European cities and followed with Top 5s, our personal compilations of the best bookstores from the Guide in selected categories. Later on we also added the Articles section, which holds a series of articles on the current state of independent bookselling, several of them were written by guest bloggers. We also send out a monthly newsletter to which you can subscribe by filling your email address in the box in the left sidebar.

Five years is a long period of time and a lot has changed in our personal lives as well. When we started the blog, we were both students living in two different countries, while today we live together and we both have full-time jobs and also several other projects. As some of you have probably noticed, we used to add bookstores much more often in the past. Yes, this is partly due to the fact that our database has grown in size, but we know best that this situation is mostly caused by our lack of time...
bsg korea

Writing this post made us think not only about the past but also about the future of Bookstore Guide and although we are not happy about the present state of the site, it is a good opportunity for us to realistically evaluate where we'd like to see Bookstore Guide in the upcoming years and how to achieve it. We have several scenarios in our minds but before implementing any major changes we simply need to focus on some maintenance work - updating information about the existing bookstores and patching some errors on the website. The main goal would be to dedicate more time to the Guide, which will not be easy. As this Guide only serves some purpose if it has its audience, we'd also like to turn to you. If you have any comments, questions, recommendations or ideas about where you'd like to see this project heading in the near future, we would love to read them.

Thanks for sticking with us for so long,

Yours, Sonja and Ivan

Tackle and Books, Tobermory


 
Where? Tobermory, Scotland, UK


Recommended by Cristina Cona

"Are you going to spend some time on the island of Mull, and wondering whether you’ll have to bring books from the mainland for those long summer nights when you can read by natural light until ten o’clock? Don’t worry: you can get your reading matter from Tackle and Books, in the gorgeous village of Tobermory. The shop is located on the seafront (its red and dark-grey façade appears on a number of postcards) and caters to all kinds of needs. There is first of all the book section, which has a very satisfying choice of both fiction and various aspects of nonfiction (nature guides, local and Scottish interest, children’s books, language – both Scots and Gaelic); there is a stationery and business services section; some CDs and DVDs; an area where you can buy fishing and outdoor tackle, and last but not least, a really invaluable stock of midge machines. At least some BSG readers will regard this as a surprising item for a bookstore, but you must know that midges are a real plague in most parts of Scotland and can make life impossible to walkers, fishermen, nature lovers, and generally anybody who likes to venture out in soft, moist weather. No reading under a tree when the little so-and-so’s are around! So it makes perfect sense to sell these machines alongside the books.”

If choosing a specific area of interest you feel passionate about and specializing in it is the way to go for a bookstore in a competitive metropolitan market, it's most likely not so when your business is located in a small village on an island... So what to do then? Judging by the example of Tackle and Books, if you wish to succeed in an environment like this, you should select the widest range of topics and things you feel passionate about and then get them all under one roof. The common link is clear, as long as there's passion behind it, you have a good chance of surviving.

Besides the incredibly wide offer of this shop it is also quite famous for its location. Tackle and Books was established some 30 years ago in premises which previously housed a butcher, a baker, a chemist and a grocer and they kept some of the original furniture. As the shop is among the colorful houses lining the harbor, it can be spotted on most photographs of the town of Tobermory.

Tackle and Books TobermoryTackle and Books
Address:
Tackle and Books interior 7 Main Street
Tobermory
Isle of Mull
Scotland
United Kingdom

Website: http://www.tackleandbooks.co.uk

Phone and Email:
01688 302 336.
info@tackleandbooks.co.uk

Working Hours: unknown

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