BookShopWorld

One of the world’s best-known bookstores, Blackwell’s stands out for its long history, its rare book collection, and its prodigious stock of academic titles. Located across from the Bodleian, the store is easy on the eyes, with a selection that’s always reliable. Blackwell’s very well could be the premier academic bookstore in the world.

Blackwell’s is an Oxford institution. Founded in 1879, the store has catered to local town and gown for almost 150 years. With so much history, the store has bookselling down to a science. Its academic selection is commendable, its student discounts are generous, and its notable guest-speakers draw big crowds. (Recent guests include Jeremy Corbyn and Judith Butler.) In other words, Blackwell’s excels in every metric. It’s hard to ask for anything more from a local bookshop, and Blackwell’s follows up its superb main location with a worthy encore: two nearby specialty shops, focused on music and sci-fi respectively.

But the icing on the cake is Blackwell’s giant Norrington Room—a vaulting subterranean room filled with hundreds of thousands of books. The Norrington Room is visually striking, with its terraced floors and mazelike shelves. It’s one of the most unique bookselling venues in the world and has become a key Oxford tourist site, even among those who don’t. The Norrington Room complements Blackwell’s cute upstairs, completing a world-class bookstore that isn’t to be missed.

Times are changing, however. Since the 1990s, Blackwell’s has expanded rapidly, with proliferating UK locations and a number of high-profile acquisitions (like buying Heffers in Cambridge). Additionally, the store has become a tourist destination. Blackwell’s was always a key Oxford site (Bill Clinton famously visited in the 90s), but in last few years tourism has gotten out of control. This influx of visitors splits Blackwell’s clientele between bookish students and well-meaning but pedestrian tourists. Such divides often fracture bookstore selection; many shops follow the money and prioritize these big-spending out-of-town buyers to the detriment of their stock. In Paris, for instance, Shakespeare & Company is a wonderful destination with all the tourist clout, but it also has long been surpassed by Librairie Galignani as the premier place to buy English-language books. Lastly, Blackwell’s was purchased by Waterstones in 2022, the largest bookstore-chain in the UK. Altogether then, there are serious pressures on Blackwells’ to compromise its selection, to dilute its academic identity in favor of tourist and commercial popularity.

Simply put—Blackwell’s reputation precedes it, but does it still live up to the hype?

I argue that it does. Masterfully, Blackwell’s splits the difference between these contending visions. Its four-story shopfront allows a diverse selection perfect for any kind of reader. And the bustling tourist population seamlessly intermingles with a consistent student presence (the upstairs Cafe Nero is a popular study-spot, for instance). Some local bookbuyers complain that, since the Waterstones acquisition, scholarly offerings are slightly deemphasized in favor of popular fare. But even if true, this only affects book advertisement at the front of the store, not the shop’s considerable downstairs collection. Special props go to Blackwell’s built-out Philosophy section and its individual shelving for foreign fiction. One might quibble that Blackwell’s used selection is half-hearted; it sometimes seems the store itself doesn’t know what to do with these used volumes. But on the whole, Blackwell’s is a marvelous shop. It ranks among an elite few bookstores at the highest echelons of quality.