A lot of my visiting friends have commented on the Academic Bookstore in Helsinki, designed by Alvar Aalto in the 60’s. The interior is light and airy, not stuffy or cramped. The atmosphere’s really nice, I can find pretty much any book I want there or have it ordered, and there’s a café and restaurant on the second floor.
Yes, the World’s Biggest was a big-box bookshop before there were big-box bookshops. It’s not connected to the Coles/Chapters/Indigo conglomerate. (I think it may have been the actual world’s biggest bookstore when it was built somewhere before 1980.)
But speaking of science-fiction bookshops, there’s Bakka Books in Toronto. It’s apparently now back on Queen Street West, but west of Spadina. (Must check it out again…)
Sorry. It is connected to Chapters/Indigo/Coles.
Although bricks & mortar may be implied, your criterion didn’t exclude Amazon.
Since I live nowhere near any of those fine stores mentioned so far, Amazon is the place I shop for books the most. High in ambience, theme and architecture. And I suspect the stock quantity compares favorably to the biggest of the bricks & mortar stores and its sales probably exceed any of them. Your GF shouldn’t omit it.
Cody’s closed their original Telegraph Avenue store several months ago. The Fourth Street store is still open, but many of the shelves are empty. The business was sold to a management company, and who knows what they will do with it? So I wouldn’t put Cody’s in a list of the world’s most exceptional bookstores. It may have belonged in such a list a few years ago, but not any more.
Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle is a wonderful store (yay independents), and Bookmans in Tucson is pleasant.
Neither of them is Powells, though. I haven’t been there in about 20 years, but last time I was there, their Nature Section was almost as big as my house. It had an entire bay just on insects, with a whole shelf devoted to ants. You have to admire that kind of compulsive variety. I hear that since then, they’ve expanded, too.
Here’s a website including many of the bookstores mentioned so far:
Let me make a note in particular of Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. For those of you in the U.S. who watch a lot of Book TV on C-Span, it’s the most common place for C-Span to film an author reading. For those of you outside of the U.S., C-Span is a set of three channels that are available on most cable TV providers in the U.S. They are all 24-hour channels and don’t have any commercials. They show all the Senate and House of Representatives proceedings, not just on the main floor but also a lot of committee hearings. They also do a lot of meetings and speeches all over the U.S. with political implications. (They at least used to show Prime Minister’s Question Time from the British House of Commons too. I don’t know if they’re still showing it.)
They do 48 hours every week on C-Span 2 (from Saturday 6:00 AM to Monday 6:00 AM) with just events concerned with books with political implications. (Besides books about politics, they do books about American history and biographies of politically important people.) This means author readings and signings in bookstores, talks at literary festivals by authors, and interviews with authors. If you sat there for all 48 hours each week, you might see a half a dozen to a dozen different author readings from Politics and Prose.