The Bookshop, Wigtown

Largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland

About Shop Online
 

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.

So wherever you are in the world you can shop at The Bookshop. European Union customers European VAT is paid at checkout so no costly import taxes or postal charges on orders under 150 euros.

We hope you enjoy browsing our independent online shop.

 

Book of the Month

Night Train To Odesa – Covering The Human Cost of Russia’s War

Jen Stout

Jen’s account of her time in Ukraine during the Russian invasion is not political hectoring, nor is it the work of someone who has the machinery of a vast media organisation behind them; it is a moving examination of the consequences of a brutal war on the lives of ordinary people boxed into the corner of a conflict from which they can’t escape, written by someone who had to rely on the kindness of strangers to survive.


The Bookseller’s Books

Remainders of the Day: More Diaries from The Bookshop, Wigtown

The Bookshop in Wigtown is a bookworm’s idyll – with thousands of books across nearly a mile of shelves, a real log fire, and Captain, the bookshop cat. You’d think after twenty years, owner Shaun Bythell would be used to the customers by now. Don’t get him wrong – there are some good ones amoung the antiquarian porn-hunters, die-hard Arthurians, people who confuse bookshops for libraries and the toddlers just looking for a nice cosy corner in which to wee. He’s sure there are. There must be some good ones, right?

Filled with the pernickety warmth and humour that has touched readers around the world, stuffed with literary treasures, hidden hems and incunabula, Ramainders of the Day is Shaun Bythell’s latest entry in his bestselling diary series.

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.

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.

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.

The Book Shop Bag

Now available to buy in our online shop.

Time to leave your comfort zone???

Join our Random Book Club.

Watch

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

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Follow us on Facebook for all the latest daily goings on.

Moving? Have 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
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