"The last real bookshop"

A review of Voltaire & Rousseau by Annonymous written on Sunday 8th of March 2009

Voltaire & Rousseau is everything that a great second-hand bookshop should be. Silent, dishevelled and rammed to the rafters with great books. It has been quietly sitting in Otago Lane for over 30 years, becoming a mecca for Glasgow's students and intellectuals. It's not a big place but every inch is chock full of something. What's I love most about it is that there's no real sense of hierarchy. It gives the impression that no book is too unfashionable, too old or too shabby. New books mingle with old. Hardbacks and paperbacks come together, pamphlets are fair game. If the spine is broken or the dust jacket's ripped that's fine, no one stands on ceremony here. It feels like more a tribute to the printed word than a business.

As you enter there's an ante-room filled with the discards of serious book sorting efforts. You can often hit paydirt here. Wonderful vintage books that even charity shops won't touch, Penguin paperbacks, Faber plays, Haynes car manuals, 1970s textbooks, and spectacular children's books from the 1950s are piled high, sprinkled with general odds and ends like pamphlets, maps and even a pile of disembodied dust jackets.

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