Overview
The neighbourhood bookshop is a special place. Not only is it a localised record of the human race and its creativity, all the stories that we have and could tell, but it's a community space for in-person connection over physical goodies.
That tactile browsing experience, tilting your head to better read the title on the spine, holding a power squat while you test-read a page or two, breathing deep into that new book smell while your fellow bibliophiles undertake their own book browsing rituals. It's nothing short of magic. In Brisbane, there are more than enough choices when it comes to bookshops. From the river to the valley and beyond, these are our picks for the best stores to find your next read all over town.
Katy Bedford
Avid Reader
193 Boundary St, West End
Back in 1997, Fiona Stager, Kevin Guy, Verdi Guy and Colleen Mullin took a page out of the book from stores down in Sydney to fill a literary gap in West End. Their solution was Avid Reader, and it's been doing a bang-up job of supplying that demand from its Boundary St storefront since 2004. Avid is loved by locals, but was also named Australia's Best Bookshop at the Australian Book Industry Awards in 2021, so it's punching in a national class.
Avid's stock is broad, with new-release fiction and non-fiction taking centre stage. There's a busy author-starring events and workshops program that welcomes voices from around the literary world into the store, an on-premises cafe where you can tear into your freshly purchased read, and curated subscription boxes available online if you want the experts to do the browsing for you.
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Bent Books
205a Boundary St, West End
Another West End favourite, this loud and proud bookshop is small, but mighty, with over 29 years of bookselling behind it to cement it as the local champ of second-hand books. Bent's specialty is the pre-loved, and it's an impressive collection. On these shelves, you're pretty damn likely to find something to suit your reading needs, with the weird and wonderful and the classic and formal available in equal measure.
From it's colourful cottage space on Boundary and Vulture Streets, where it moved to last year, Bent has worked hard to build a customer community, due in part to excellent service — it's known that if you can't find what you're looking for, you'll get a personal call if it arrives.
Baffies Oan Books
225 Mount Glorious Road, Samford
As mentioned, the great joy of visiting your local bookstore is settling into the slow and steady ritual of perusing the stock and finding your next great escape. That pace and escape is the core for Samford Valley favourite Baffies Oan, ideal for anybody looking to escape the busyness of the city for a day. The slowness is in the name, a nod to the founders' Scottish heritage that translates to slippers on, an invitation to all customers to take a breath and browse at maximum comfort.
You can do so in front of the fireplace and in some exceedingly comfy armchairs. In terms of what can be browsed, Baffies stocks a curated mix of fiction and non-fiction, both new releases and secondhand — with a buy-back scheme for customers who are tight on shelf space.
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Sweet Chapter Books & Cafe
7/366 Moggill Rd, Indooroopilly
One of the genres that's taken the reading world by storm, love it or hate it, is romantasy. A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, these series have swept over the industry, and Indooroophilly storefront Sweet Chapter has put them front and centre. But it's not just the steamy here; this is a store that's curated a stock around love, in all its literary forms and subgenres.
A special emphasis is placed on indie authors, with works from over 110 of them on the shelves, but you'll find more than a few well-known favourites among them. The store also runs a regular events program with author talks, classes and fantasy-themed game nights, and customers are encouraged to order a coffee from the cafe inside and choose a comfy chair to enjoy it over a heart-pounding purchase.
Cystic Fibrosis Queensland Bookshop
3/160 Nyans Rd, Nundah
Books, like many products, have shelf lives. If you're reading this guide you've probably watched one of your favourite books age in front of your eyes on the shelf. But what about the books that don't (yet) have a home of their own? From a bookshop, then to a library, then maybe to somewhere like Cystic Fibrosis Queensland Bookshop — where thousands of secondhand and pre-loved books are waiting to find their forever home.
This megasized bookshop has been a beloved part of Brisbane's book scene for a long time, and it's one of the biggest in the city, with a warehouse-scale space and shelves tall enough to call for tippytoe browsing. It's affordable, with books between $5 and $3 each, depending on how big your basket is, and every dollar spent supports Cystic Fibrosis Queensland.
Pulp Fiction
Shop 4, Level 1 Blocksidge & Ferguson Building Arcade, 144 Adelaide St, Brisbane City
There's warehouse-sized, every-genre-stocking bookstores, and then there's tight and tidy booksellers who have their specialty, and know what their audience wants to see. Pulp Fiction is the latter, tucked away in an upstairs store in the CBD's Blocksidge & Ferguson Arcade, with a selection that does away with scale in favour of strengths.
Those strengths are, as you might guess by the name, the shared and adjacent worlds of crime, mystery, thrillers, horror, science fiction and fantasy. Built, owned and operated by lovers of the genre(s), they take their selection seriously and blessingly, in these genres full of multi-issue sagas, make a point of stocking whole series sets.
Archives Fine Books
40 Charlotte St, Brisbane City
Some bookstores take the notion of a secondhand book and dial it up to the max, walking the line between antiquities and even historical relics if the book is precious enough. Archives Fine Books is one of Brisbane's best examples of that, where preloved books are more than just a weathered copy of Jurassic Park, but all sorts of published works that, in some cases, date back centuries.
Since 1985, Archives Fine Books has been dealing in preloved literature, and styles itself as a specialty store for as many genres as it possibly can, all housed (very fittingly) inside a heritage publishing house. The catalogue can't be summed up here, but it includes titles from the worlds of architecture, Australiana, mythology, esoterica, sociology, interior design, hunting, erotica, firearms, travel, chemistry and just about everything in between.
Riverbend Books
4/77 Oxford St, Bulimba
The mark for a great bookshop is often what you'll find on its shelves, but in the case of stores like Riverbend, it's also the role they play in their local community. Riverbend is especially good at it, since it's been awarded the title of Queensland's best independent bookshop eight times
These are shelves that speak for themselves, having done the hard yard of establishing themselves in Bulimba and Brisbane's book scene as a whole — with the payoff of a reputation of being one of the best booksellers in the state. Beyond the collection, Riverbend sells over 40,000 audiobooks and hosts regular book clubs, author appearances and book delivery subscriptions.
QAGOMA Store
Stanley Pl, South Brisbane
The QAGOMA Store is an obvious choice for those who like their gifts with a splash of creativity. However, there's nothing obvious about the selection on display at Brisbane's major art gallery. Items linked with their previous and current exhibitions are just the start.
Books of both the picturesque coffee table and the quirky in prose and presentation variety (this is a place to celebrate artists, after all) are probably the store's strongest drawcard, with something on the shelves to suit all tastes. Special emphasis is placed on art books, naturally, but there's a strong mix of titles rooted in creativity and creation by and large. There's more, of course, so expect silly stationery items, artistic umbrellas, the cutest children's toys and even hard-to-find DVDs.
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Scrumptious Reads
92A Arthur Ter, Red Hill
There's a strong connection between the subcultures of food and books; they most often meet in cookbooks and other culinary publications, but they come together in a big way at Scrumptious Reads in Red Hill. Whether you still keep a shelf of cookbooks if you've turned to the hundreds of online food creators, Scrumptious is worth a visit for their stock of kitchen inspirations (and supplies, there's plenty of pantry stockers for sale too).
Beyond the foodie selections, Scrumptious stocks plenty of fiction and non-fiction titles for all ages and a hefty collection of gifting goods, including stationery, homewares, stickers, games and art from the gallery downstairs. You can also join a number of regular workshops and book clubs, which, naturally, include food.
Lead image: Bent Books
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