Book haul – OneReadingNurse.com

Bookish Travelogue: The Great London Literary Crawl!

I & we hit so many bookstores and literary landmarks this week, it was awesome! Tomorrow we are off to sci-fi weekender which I hope will also be fun 😊

Here’s a few of the bookstores and landmarks we went to, and most of the book haul I ended up with this week!

Cecil Court is full of old books, antiques, maps, art stores, a few actual gaslamps, and so much more. I’m sharing this one first because I found my coolest book acquisition in the Goldsboro Books discount bin…

How cool is that, a Tchaikovsky Arc!

I also found a few other paperbacks up around that area, including at Any Amount of Books, a great little used bookstore with a small but spicy SFF collection in the basement 😃

Besides that, I went to Foyles and found a bunch of Paddington books that I’m going to gift out to family and friends with young kids! I loved the Foyles store but the American History section was a joke, apparently they think our entire history is Trump 🤣

A cool store to roam around though.

I also went to both Hatchard’s and Blackfriars Bridge because of the Shadowhunters books, no regrets there at all. Bride’s Church is the only landmark I didn’t bother tracking down!

Hatchard’s is a beautiful store with all the books ever, but I didn’t buy anything

We also obviously saw at least four Waterstones, where I didn’t buy anything but my excellent book crawling buddy found a few new SFF reads to load up on.

Lastly, Forbidden Planet is absolutely deadly. I say forever and ever that the UK has better editions than the US. I mean y’all’s covers are beautiful and if I had a million dollars and unlimited packing space I’d be in serious trouble! That said, I bought two signed editions from their lovely collection of books and have no regrets there. They won’t quite match my US editions but that’s ok!

There were a few other bookstores, literary statues, a George Orwell themed pubs, and many other places to go and see too. I would 100% recommend the British Library. Obviously King’s Cross Station 9 3/4 is a must see for Potter fans, as well as the Mina Lina museum/store which is up near Foyle’s somewhere. There’s so much to do literary wise in London that I could write three posts about it.

Leicester Square was fun too, movie and literary statues all over!

Anyway, I barely scratched the surface here but off to a good start!

Where have you traveled or wanted to travel to that has good literary destinations??

Indie Bookstore Day 2022 – Book Haul & Random Notes

April 30th was Independent Bookstore day! I was really happy to see the other Rochester Bookstagrammers and book lovers out in force. I actually only went to two stores and one market because holy cow, BOOKS ARE GETTING EXPENSIVE!!

As a note, there are probably… I’m going to guess at least 10 indie bookstores in the greater Rochester area – some had cupcakes, games, totes etc, I went to my local and also favorite one to support!

So – let’s talk about my Indie Bookstore Day haul!

The closest indie bookstore to me is Liftbridge Books, and I love them dearly as people and it’s an amazing Brockport staple. They have new books and a huge used section too. That said – their used books are expensive ,and a lot more than I would normally pay for used books, so I shopped sparingly

I could absolutely not resist the bookmark. One of my best tips for affordable books is to buy used if you can find good deals. Liftbridge was also nice enough to order the regular bookstagrammer crew tshirts!

My favorite indie bookstore, Bookends, is a long ish drive away but he has great prices and may be closing this year 😭. Down in Henrietta, he was offering buy-2-get-1 and he is normally willing to deal as well so I just had to drive down.

My favorite part of the day was sitting on the floor chatting with this random lady. I had surrounded myself with a spread out pile of gorgeous Darrell K. Sweet designs and was admiring them, I just want to amass a collection of his hardcovers honestly 😂 then we started talking about fantasy and that was that lol.

(Fun fact – I actually first saw Sweet’s artwork at a frontier museum and was shocked when I learned that he also did fantasy images)!

Here is my Bookends haul – I completed my WoT collection, most in hardcover now!

Those are both 1/1 hardcovers not like they’re hugely collectable but it was a cool note.

Also found a copy of The Summer Tree, which is convenient because I needed it for the Wyrd & Wonder readalong!

Then I found not one, but two signed L.E Modesitt books plus one other I didn’t have😭

Like I said, omg just give me all the covers designed by Sweet. I’m going to try to flesh out my Saga of Recluce collection apparently too

Last but certainly not least, there is a bookish candlemaker in Buffalo that was in town for an artisan market, and it was super nice to meet her finally after a year or two of bookstagram banter!

I finally own a skull candle lol! Definitely check out The Smell of Fear on Instagram or etsy for bookish candles. Apparently you can click on the thumbnails to enlarge, and now I know!

Long story short – it was a fun day. I am happy to see so many readers in the Roc community. It was good to run into some other Bookstagrammers. If anyone wants a list of all of our local bookstores, I do have that available! I wish I had time and money to see more!

(P.S. I have been planning a post on obtaining affordable books, I’m just not there yet)

Do you have any favorite indie bookstores?