Leakey's Bookshop

Leakey's fills a former Gaelic church in the middle of Inverness — a great galleried hall of a room, two storeys of secondhand books around a cast-iron wood-burning stove that keeps the whole place warm through a Highland winter. Charles Leakey started the business in 1979 and moved it into Greyfriars Hall in 1993; it is reckoned the largest secondhand bookshop in Scotland, and it reads like it, tens of thousands of titles with old maps and prints upstairs. Charles stepped back at the start of 2026, handing the running to his sons Sam and Tomas, so it stays what it has always been — a family bookshop, not a brand. Go for the stove as much as the stock: there are few better places in the north to lose an afternoon, book in one hand, the smell of woodsmoke and old paper doing the rest. The kind of shop a city is lucky to have and a reader plans a trip around.