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WHSmith

4.0 (1 review)
ModerateBookstores
Open 8:30 am - 5:30 pm

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Recommended Reviews - WHSmith

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17 years ago

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baggins book bazar - Outside

baggins book bazar

(4 reviews)

££

I really do love exploring and browsing book stores, even though I pretty much have everything I…read morewant (though I do end up finding stuff that I want). Anyway, yeah, this was a pretty cool bookshop, and there were a lot of interesting books here. Honestly, I could spend hours here.

Not that I consider myself a bookshop connoisseur as such, but I always love to check out…read moresecond-hand bookshops when I travel. This is in my top 3 bookshops I've ever visited (the other two, in case you were wondering: Shakespeare & Sons, Prague, and The Last Bookstore, Los Angeles). This place had thousands of books, with that old book smell that I love. The store seems to go on forever, and there are so many nooks and crannies filled with more books! I particularly loved the old books section; we got some classics (Jane Austen, DH Lawrence, Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo) that were editions published in the early 1900s for £3-£5. My husband raided the sci-fi section while I raided the general fiction and we came up with another 9 books between us, all between 99p and £3, and all good quality. We were only able to spend 1 hour in there. It wasn't enough. I felt rushed. I needed more time! Living in London, Rochester is only 45 minutes away. I'll be back. The guy who I believe is the owner, was friendly and sweet. This is such a great find. FYI a lot of Rochester high street is filled with little independent stores, it's a really lovely place to visit!

Much Ado Books

Much Ado Books

(2 reviews)

£££

My Mum collects rare and first edition books so I'm always in here around Christmas and birthday…read moretimes. It really is a special place for book lovers as they have some un-believable works of literature on the shelves. The owners have re-located from Boston in the USA and have bought all their passion for rare and out of print books with them. They offer good money for unwanted books that may be of interest so its worth having a dig around your attic. The books are fascinating enough but also love the antique note cards they have for sale in here. They make the perfect finish to the perfect gift.

The problem with most bookshops these days is that they are almost entirely pointless. The largest…read moreamong them can't hope to stock more than a tiny fraction of the books on sale in the world, while their online competitors stock everything. As such, the only thing that can make a bookshop worth the space it occupies is the quality of the fraction that they select. So many bookshops - independents as well as majors - choose to stock the tiny fraction at the bulbous head of the demand curve, presumably in the hope that the public will be so in love with the idea of their businesses that they'll shun the urge to pick up their copy of The Hungry Vampire Games at Tesco or on amazon and romantically saunter into a bookshop instead. It's the kind of thinking that sees To Let signs replace Cardboard cutouts of Hogwarts in shopfronts across the world. The only thing to do, really, is to treat your choice of books as the beating artistic heart of your business. Stocking a bookshop should be an act of curation - designed to sell people books they didn't know they wanted when they walked into your building. It is in this that Much Ado excels. If you can read at secondary school level, I defy you to spend half an hour in this shop without finding something to covet. The selection of new books is a marvel of discriminatory taste - the second hand section plentiful and engrossing. Buy a gift and they will wrap it for you more efficiently and more prettily than any package you've ever seen. It looks quaint, it looks old-fashioned, it looks like the past - but it isn't. If there is to be such a thing as a future for indpendent bookshops, then this shop is it. Long may it continue.

WHSmith - bookstores - Updated May 2026

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