Nicole Junkerman
Reading
Nicole Junkerman's Favourite Kind of Bookshop, and Why They Are Worth the Detour
In praise of the small, well-kept bookshop, the kind that sells you a book you did not know you were looking for.
In praise of the small, well-kept bookshop, the kind that sells you a book you did not know you were looking for.
Some shops sell books, and some shops sell reading. The difference is hard to define and easy to feel the moment you walk in. Nicole Junkerman has a particular love for the second kind: the small, well-kept bookshop where someone has clearly chosen every book on the table, where the staff read, and where you walk out holding something you had no idea you were looking for. These shops are worth a detour in any city, and seeking them out has become part of how she travels.
It is not nostalgia. A great bookshop does something no list and no algorithm can: it surprises you on purpose. It puts the right unexpected book in your hands at the right moment, which is one of the small miracles of a reading life.
The pleasure of good curation
Walk into a well-curated bookshop and you can feel a mind at work. The front table is an argument. The staff picks, often handwritten on small cards, are an invitation into someone else's reading. This is the opposite of the endless scroll, where everything is available and nothing is recommended with any real conviction. A good bookseller has read widely, chosen carefully, and is quietly offering you the results. Nicole Junkerman treasures that act of curation, because it is generous in a way that automated suggestions never quite manage.
The best discovery is always the book you were not looking for. You came in for one title and leave with three, two of them by writers you had never heard of an hour ago. This is serendipity by design, and it is the single best argument for buying books in person. A shelf arranged by a thoughtful human is a machine for happy accidents.
Independent bookshops have had a genuine revival in recent years, which is heartening for anyone who loves them. Coverage in the major press has tracked how independent bookshops are thriving again, a quiet good-news story in a difficult retail decade, and every visit is a small vote to keep it going.
Bookshops as a way of reading a city
A local bookshop is one of the fastest ways to understand a city. Its shelves are a portrait of what a place reads and cares about: which local writers it celebrates, which histories it keeps in print, which subjects fill the front window. Nicole Junkerman often makes a bookshop her first stop in a new city for exactly this reason, treating it as a kind of reading room for the place itself.
Then there are the staff. Ask a bookseller in a new city for a novel set nearby, and you will get a recommendation worth more than any guidebook entry, chosen by someone who lives there and loves the subject. That single question, asked in a good shop, has shaped many of the best books in her travelling bag. It connects directly to the journal's piece on reading your way through a new city, where the right local book makes the streets legible.
Some bookshops are destinations in their own right, woven into the cultural life of their cities. A place like Shakespeare and Company in Paris shows how a bookshop can become part of a city's literary memory, a working shop and a piece of history at once. You do not need a famous one, though. The unremarkable shop on a side street, well-kept and well-loved, will serve you just as faithfully.
The bookshop as a quiet room
Beyond what they sell, the best bookshops offer something increasingly rare: a quiet, unhurried room where no one is trying to rush you. You can browse for an hour and buy nothing, and a good shop will not mind. Nicole Junkerman values this quality almost as much as the books themselves, the sense of a calm space set apart from the noise of the street, where time slows down and attention has room to wander.
This is part of why a bookshop makes such a fine refuge while travelling. Tired from walking, overwhelmed by a new city, you can step into a bookshop and find immediate calm, a familiar kind of room in an unfamiliar place. The books may be in another language, but the hush is the same the world over, and a quarter of an hour among the shelves restores you for the rest of the day.
A bookshop also invites the kind of slow browsing that screens have nearly erased. Running a finger along the spines, pulling out a book on a whim, reading the first page standing up: this is a gentle, tactile pleasure that no website reproduces. The shop rewards patience and curiosity, and it gives back, almost every time, a book you are glad to have found.
Why the detour is always worth it
A bookshop detour rarely costs more than twenty minutes, and it routinely pays back the whole trip. You leave with a book that will carry the city home with you, a small physical souvenir more lasting than anything from a gift shop. Nicole Junkerman would rather come home with one book bought in a memorable shop than a suitcase of things she will never look at again. The book keeps the place; the trinkets do not.
There is also the simple pleasure of supporting the shops themselves. Every well-kept bookshop is held up by people who could probably earn more doing something easier, and choosing to buy from them is a small, real kindness. The piece in this journal on the books worth packing is, in a sense, a companion to this one: first you find the shop, then you choose what to carry.
So next time you pass a small bookshop, at home or abroad, take the detour. Go in without a list. Read the staff cards, ask a question, and let the shop hand you something unexpected. Then carry it out into the city and read it where you are. And whenever you want another thread to follow, the front door of this journal is always open.
Questions readers ask
What makes a great bookshop?
For Nicole Junkerman it is curation and care: a shop where someone has clearly chosen the stock, where staff read, and where you leave with a book you did not know you wanted.
Why visit bookshops while travelling?
A local bookshop is one of the fastest ways to understand a place. Its shelves reveal what a city reads and cares about, and its staff can point you to writers no algorithm would surface.
Explore more of the journal: Reading Room and City Notes, or return to the Nicole Junkerman home page.