Voltaire &Rousseau

Two McGonigle brothers opened Voltaire & Rousseau in 1972 and one of them runs it still, in an Otago Lane shop that has become a Glasgow legend for the sheer geological accumulation of its stock: books piled floor to ceiling and then along the floor, sorted by a logic known only to the shop and its cats, browsed by everyone from students to location scouts who use it as instant set-dressing. It calls itself the city's oldest secondhand bookshop and nobody serious disputes it. The long Save Otago Lane campaign fought off redevelopment of the historic close around it; the shop, gloriously unmodernised, is the reason the lane was worth saving.