The Bookshop, Wigtown

Largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland

The Bookshop, Wigtown

The Bookshop is the largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland, with over a mile of shelving supporting roughly 100,000 books.

The shop, the oldest bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland’s National Booktown, is home to our extensive range of stock covering all subjects of all ages for all ages.

After years of selling through huge online monopolies, we finally decided that we’d had enough of being told what to do by algorithms and built our own online shop.

Here it is. We hope you’ll like it.

Browse our stock

Search our online stock

The Bookseller’s Books

The Diary of a Bookseller

A unique chance to join Shaun Bythell, the owner of The Bookshop, to see behind the scenes of the world that is bookselling. Through his honest and wryly hilarious diaries, we get a very different view of bookselling: one beset with malfunctioning heating, eccentric customers, bad-mannered, bin-foraging employees and a perennially empty till.

Shaun takes us with him on buying trips to old estates and auction houses, recommends books (both lost classics and new discoveries), introduces us to the thrill of the unexpected find, and evokes the charms and horrors of small town life.

International bestseller, The Diary of a Bookseller, has now been translated into twenty-eight languages.

Buy Now

Confessions of a bookseller

Bookselling, Shaun reveals in his sequel to the bestselling The Diary of a Bookseller, is far from the idyll you might imagine. Beset by bizarre requests from customers who appear not to know what a shop is, locked in an endless struggle with Amazon and terrorised by his bin-diving, poultice-making employees, Shaun documents his trials and tribulations with a sharp eye and even sharper wit.

This is the inside story of a life lived in books: from the pleasures of the unexpected find to the friendships forged over shared tastes and the sadness of finishing a really good book, Confessions of a Bookseller will delight and inform until the very last page.

Buy Now

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

In twenty years behind the till in The Bookshop, Wigtown, Shaun Bythell has met pretty much every kind of customer there is – from the charming, erudite and deep-pocketed to the eccentric, flatulent and possibly larcenous.

In Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops he distils the essence of his experience into a warm, witty and quirky taxonomy of the book-loving public. So, step inside to meet the crafty Antiquarian, the shy and retiring Erotica Browser and gormless yet strangely likeable shop assistant Student Hugo – along with much loved booksellers favourites like the passionate Sci-Fi Fan, the voracious Railway Collector and the ever-elusive Perfect Customer.

Buy Now

Watch

Meet Shaun, tour the Bookshop, meet some of the visitors and staff, plus so much more….

More Bookshop Clips

Follow the story on Facebook

The Bookshop

1 day ago

Spent this morning helping Norrie fix the plaster heads on top of the concrete book spirals. ... See MoreSee Less

View on Facebook

View Comments

Likes: 1109
Shares: 6
Comments: 50

Comment on Facebook

Was this a lockdown inspiration? It looks like an illustration of some medieval torture. Booked to death???

Looking good 😀

Looking good!

Am I alone in thinking the books looked better without the heads?

Love them, they look fantastic. Hopefully I get to see them in person one day.🤗

Ok, who thought they were customers that had ended up there for not putting a book back on the right shelf?

Have you applied for planning permission this time?🤔

It great to see the actual bookshop in the book.

Am just up to the bit in the second book where you have to apply retroactively for planning permission so it's fascinating to actually see them.

Where I live (downtown San Diego, CA), those heads would be knocked off their book towers in a nanosecond. Ah, to live in a town where the books won't be beheaded.

When I first saw those columns, they were actual books!

What a joy to see the spirals of concrete books, wich I read about in your book 🤗

Absolutely beautiful - such class!!

Bet they are the encased heads of The Bookshops most annoying customers to act as warning to others 😉

Good to see them social distancing... (the concrete heads I mean)...

Can’t wait for the next books on The Bookshop

Part of the famous library of Alexandria, Egypt ?

You’re creating quite the architectural feature for future archaeologists to ponder over 😁❤️

Now all they need are some trailing plants perched on top of them ......

My, those look terrific.

Those are amazing!

Looks great !

Those are so amazing!

Are you going to make them revolve next like the ones at Camb Uni library?! 🤣

Saludos Shaun... se ven muy bien las espirales de libros... nacen plantas en las páginas de concreto... Saludos desde #elrincondellector

View more comments

Moving? Or books to sell?

If you’ve got books you’d like to sell, contact us at [email protected], or by phone at 01988 402499.

Press

‘All the ingredients for a gentle human comedy are here, as soothing as a bag of boiled sweets and just as tempting to dip into.’

- Confessions of a Bookseller - Adam Douglas, Literary Review

‘Utterly compelling and Bythell has a Bennett-like eye for the amusing eccentricities of ordinary people … I urge you to buy this book and please, even at the risk of being insulted or moaned at, buy it from a real live bookseller.’

- The Diary of a Bookseller - Charlotte Heathcote, Sunday Express