Bookstores Around the World

Artist and book lover Maria Ivashkina takes readers on an inspiring and exciting tour of 25 of the world’s most unusual bookstores, sharing her love for these incredibly rich community spaces in the process.

A bookstore is a place of wonder and refuge the world over. It’s a place that always feels magical, and one where discoveries and good surprises inevitably happen. It’s also a place where any one of us might curl up for hours and travel to other worlds. Within the walls of a bookstore, books await, offering stories upon stories and ideas that influence how we see and feel and who we might become. Books invite us on journeys both delightful and risky into the world as we know it and as we do not.

In these pages, we visit bookstores inside a train station and a cathedral, a floating bookstore and a bookstore the size of a whole neighborhood, the oldest bookstore and a bookstore that sells only one book, the first outdoor bookstore and a bookstore where you can live. The bookstores depicted here are in the United States, Argentina, Portugal, France, England, and beyond.

Bookstores are a beautiful, vital destination, but they are also waypoints on the path to a deeper understanding of self and world. This book is sure to become a cherished companion, inspiring readers to venture beyond its pages into the experience that only a great bookstore can provide.

Maria Ivashkina is an author, designer, and illustrator from Moscow, Russia. She graduated with a degree in architecture and design from the Moscow Institute of Architecture and has a master’s degree in editorial design from the HSE Art and Design School. In 2020, she founded MILE Books, a small, independent publisher of picture books. She is the author and illustrator of I Feel That Way, Too!, which was selected as a finalist for the prestigious Golden Pinwheel Award at the Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair. Lena Traer is a Russian- and English-language literary translator with a focus on books for children and young adults. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Her past projects include translating Miss Leoparda (also published by Enchanted Lion), Wind: Discovering Age in Motion, On the Edge of the World (both published by Eerdmans), and How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend (Thames & Hudson) into English and translating a variety of picture books and scientific materials into Russian. Born and raised in Siberia, Russia, Traer now lives in San Francisco.