Top 5 Bookshops in Cambridge
If you’re a certified bookworm, you’ll know that some places are just better at books than others. Charing Cross Road. Hay on Wye. And Cambridge, with its concentration of colleges and students, has a huge amount of amazing bookshops to find and visit.
Heffers
Heffers is something of a Cambridge Institution, although it’s now owned by academic chain Blackwell’s. Still, the shop has been open since 1876, and opposite Trinity College in its current location since 1970. With departments ranging from children’s books to crime fiction, it’s been called ‘the most knowledgeable bookshop in Cambridge’.
Waterstones
Waterstones is a UK institution, but the shop in Cambridge is fantastic by any standards. Four floors carry the best of books from all over the world with a slightly more academic bent than your average chain bookshop. The case of the man who was trapped in the Cambridge Waterstones after staff closed up with him still inside earlier this year proves how easy it is to get lost in a book here!
The Haunted Bookshop
The Haunted Bookshop has one ghost, but the main attraction are the books, stacked on the ground floor in huge piles in a treasure trove. Upstairs, there’s classic children’s fiction, books that you might have been given as a child in a wonderful first edition.
Cambridge University Press Bookshop
One for the serious booklovers among you, the Cambridge University Press Bookshop is on the oldest bookshop site in the world. It doesn’t stock fiction or poetry, but serious academic texts on literary theory, philosophy and more. Browse along with scholars and students and pick up some essays on Shakespeare—or just some of the great range of high-quality souvenirs and gifts they sell for anyone as obsessed with books as you.
Books for Amnesty
This is a charity bookshop with a difference. This shop is stocked with a fabulous selection of rare and unusual books, maps, children’s books, vinyl, books in Greek and Latin, sheet music, and both fiction as well as non-fiction. All profits go to a great charity, and because Cambridge has so many booklovers in it, the charity bookshops are well-stocked with good quality second hand texts. The shop says they’re particularly strong in fiction, art and philosophy.
