London Bookshop Crawl: London Review Bookshop

It's another not really edition of Make Mine an Indie featuring another stop on our London Bookshop Crawl! It's just a couple of weeks away and honestly browsing the websites to write these posts has ramped my excitement levels up to fever pitch. When the day actually comes I may be so excited I'll have lost all ability to actually make words and will just run round waving all my bookish tote bags at people. You have been warned...

When we voted for the shops we wanted to include in the itinerary for this event the London Review Bookshop came top, and looking at the website I can see why. It looks like it has everything I want in a bookshop; space to browse without falling over each other, amazing cake and a lot of books. I watched their short video of their customers talking about why they love the bookshop and several people said something about wanting to go to bookshops to find the thing they didn't know they wanted to read and I was there nodding along. I've steered myself away from writing any kinds of lists for the crawl as I want to surprise myself with what I'll find and I'm particularly excited about what I might find here.

The London Review Bookshop was opened by the London Review of Books in 2003 and considering it's round the corner from the British Museum and has cake it's a bit of a travesty that I've not yet been there. They stock over 20,000 titles in a massive range of subjects and aim to be "intelligent without being pompous; engaged without being partisan". Honestly, I think we're going to do very well there...

If you haven't already please, please check out their website. In the about section they have a little map of all the things they think you should do around Bloomsbury once you've visited them, and I kind of wish we could. I once did a writers walk around that area, finding blue plaques for Virginia Woolf et al and it was awesome... Another thing for another time!

Add to all of this the fact that they have their own cake shop, in which the tea is served 'in the manner that most complements its flavour'. They have an actual tea menu and it's nine pages long. I feel like I've found my spiritual home, after all this time.

As you can see, these posts are a little more biased than my Make Mine an Indie posts usually are, but that's because I've been excited about organising the bookshop crawl for so long now that it's literally getting to the point where all I can do is jump up and down and squeak about it. Also all of these bookshops look so awesome that it's impossible not to get excited about them. Honestly I think my excitement levels show how I did exactly the right thing starting this blog.

If you've been and have other good things to say about it that I've missed out please feel free to say them in the comments, and if you're on the bookshop crawl with me please be aware that you may have to physically remove me from this shop...

Find the London Review Bookshop on their website, twitter (for the book shop and the cake shop), Facebook and Instagram or with us on February 6th!

Check out my posts about other #LondonBookshopCrawl stops Orbital Comics and Persephone or catch up with the rest of the Make Mine an Indie series here.