Amblongus Books

Amblongus Books opened on Upper Northgate Street in Chester in February 2022, when owner Sally Atkin, a long-term resident of the city and a former photographer, converted a unit that had spent the previous twenty years as an upholstery workshop. The shop takes its name from Edward Lear's nonsense poem about an impossible pie, a nod to Atkin's approach of stocking a deliberately wide range of secondhand titles rather than a narrow specialism. Visual arts, photography, design and poetry form the backbone of the stock, alongside cookery, nature writing, classic fiction and children's books, with prices kept low and a standing bin of titles priced at fifty pence or given away free. The shop was formally opened by the city's then Member of Parliament, Chris Matheson, and keeps to a Tuesday-to-Saturday week.