Skoob Books

Skoob Books occupies a shop that runs from a basement up into a ground-floor unit inside the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury, close to Russell Square. Chris Edwards bought the business in 2006, building on a shop first opened in 1979 by former staff of a defunct bookseller. The stock on site runs past seventy thousand secondhand titles, arranged by subject from politics and history to the natural sciences, with a further hundred thousand held online and a warehouse in Oxfordshire behind that. Skoob also hires out books as props for film and television productions, a sideline that keeps slow-moving stock in circulation. It was named London's Best Bookshop by Time Out in 2010 and became the first London bookshop to hold Living Wage Employer accreditation, a detail more about how the shop is run than what it sells.