Hey Blog! This week’s post is about the best bookshop in the universe!*
Scarthin Books is one of my favourite places on the planet. It looks, from the outside, like your standard private village bookstore; but once you step inside it changes to a seemingly endless extradimensional portal to the bookiverse the most fantastic bookshop ever. It may not be put at number one on the world bookshop rankings, but for me, it is. Seriously it is fantastic. With an amazing café, rooms upon rooms upon rooms of books, three floors, outdoor seating, and a bookcase that is in fact a door (something like to the secret panels I’ve dreamed of); this is the epitome of all bookshops. And it’s just two stops on the train away!
We decided to go to there on my birthday, just a few days ago, which is what gave me the idea for writing this. I feel the pull of bookshops like magnets, it seems; probably stemming from the days when we had no fixed abode as it was once put on a prescription and had to stop off at various bookshops to buy presents for various relatives. I used to then start reading a book and read it until I was dragged away, then when we went to the next bookshop, I would find the same place in the same book and continue reading. This, is of course not the cause nor the result of the French for bookshop – librarie – but is an interesting point to note. Ah, I love etymology!
I did get a birthday cake this year (morse code decoration) but I also had a slice of Scarthin café’s excellent cake. And one of their fantastic caramel lattes. I also bought two books, both brilliant. One was The Grey King from the Dark is Rising Sequence; you may remember I reviewed one in that series a while ago. This one is about Will, last of the Old Ones, and Bran, the Pendragon, finding the golden Harp of the Light and waking the Sleepers. The other book was The Light Hunters, which is from a new author I’ve never tried before. It’s always exiting to try a new book, as you never know when a brilliant author could appear of which I later purchase several series for my collection. That post is currently held only by Enid Blyton, so I’m on the look out for more! I spend a lot of time looking around bookshops and reading most of the way through a book before buying it – which some may say defeats the point – and Scarthin Books is very good for this in having a LOT of very good books. I am glad to have it so near!
HEIAS Bookshop Rating /100: 99/100. That’s good!
*Subjective…