The Best Book Shops In West Yorkshire

In the first of series of alternative guides to gift buying we asked author Benjamin Myers @benmyers1 to share his favourite places to buy books

To some of us, book shops are more important than churches and literature more satisfying than any organised religion. Because book shops offer all philosophies, all faiths, all ideas. You just have to choose one and dive in.

That’s why when Amazon email me every single week trying sell me copies of my own books at hugely reduced rates – often less than half the cover price – I feel deflated. This is not book buying as a mind-expanding experience. It is cold hard commerce in which profits are then squirreled away in offshore accounts. The writer and publisher takes the hit and something near-magical – the book browse as past-time – becomes a drab experience

So Amazon may rule the online book market but the book shops still belong to us.  The best literary emporium in West Yorkshire is in Salt’s Mill, Saltaire. In this vast post-industrial warehouse space books – and more importantly – browsers are given room to breathe. The selection is excellent, with the buyers understanding the power of great cover design. In Salt’s Mill the book is an object of desirability, an approach consistent with the close proximity of some of the greatest art works of the past century – the paintings of David Hockney on the floor below. In this building, food and literature, art and antiques exist in perfect symbiosis and you never feel a victim of the air-conditioned nightmare that is today’s retail experience.

Salt’s Mill is a Goliath of a building, but it has its own David up the hill in the shape of the Saltaire Book Shop. This  small shop has a strong and well-priced selection of second hand works, as well as playing to host to many regular readings. It’s my first port of call in seeking out early editions of Northern ‘kitchen sink’ classics that I often buy for the covers alone. Another rummage spot is the book shop is at the Piece Hall, Halifax. Tucked away is a cornucopia of second hands books, with an especially strong selection of books on landscape and a nature.

Thanks to the Primarkification of high street clothing, gone are the days of picking up decent secondhand clothes in charity shops. However, Oxfam cleverly identified a replacement opportunity: the Oxfam book shop (Bradford, Huddersfield, Ilkley, Headingley). These are some of the most thoughtfully stocked book shops around. When I want to investigate big name authors – Pat Barker, JM Coetzee or Jake Arnott, say – I head to Oxfam.

Trading since 1984, The Book Case in Hebden Bridge is the sole seller in a literary town, and well worth a visit. It’s also mile the Arvon Foundation’s residential writing school so you may well see some big names passing through. Along the road, Todmorden is home to two second hand shops – Lyalls and Border Bookshop, which specialises in comics and sports books.

A well-thumbed paperback tells its own stories beyond the words on the page. If we don’t support the smaller sellers of new and old – and the independent publishers too – we’ll be left with nothing but joyless unsolicited emails and sterile spaces  stacked to the ceiling solely with surplus Pippa Middleton books. And we can’t have that.

Happy spending.

Where’s your favourite book shop? How far would you travel to get there? Let us know in the comments below.

Next up  in our series of alternative gifts @BookElfLeeds shares her list of must read books

Pig Iron by Benjamin Myers is out now on Bluemoose Books (www. bluemoosebooks.com)