The Bookshop

Shaun Bythell bought The Bookshop on the first of November 2001, aged thirty, and has spent the years since accumulating roughly a mile of shelving and a hundred thousand books on Wigtown's North Main Street — the largest secondhand bookshop in Scotland, and the reason the town wears its National Book Town title without embarrassment. Bythell's Diary of a Bookseller, published in 2017 and translated into more than twenty languages, turned the shop's daily grind of house clearances and eccentric customers into an international bestseller, which is a strange fate for a rural bookshop and a well-earned one. The stock is genuinely secondhand and genuinely vast; the proprietor is genuinely there. Scotland's book town has a dozen shops and one cathedral, and this is the cathedral.