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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Watch

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

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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