Snoopers’ Paradise

Cornerhouse

70 Oxford Street

Cornerhouse has it all; a bar, café, three floors of contemporary art galleries and three screens showing the latest independent cinema from the world over. And to top it off, a brilliant bookshop.
Cornerhouse have more than 2,700 publications in stock, and their catalogue encompasses books on every type of visual art you can think of, which can be ordered online and collected from the bookshop. Their best new titles include David Shrigley’s ‘Brain Activity’ and ‘Is Britain Great?’, which was actually published by Cornerhouse.
In the bookshop itself, you can find a load of great titles on film theory and the visual arts, as well as many art, music, fashion and film magazines you won’t find elsewhere. Oh, and I can never leave Cornerhouse without buying a couple of the bloody good postcards they have in store.
I highly recommend you pop in next time you are hanging around by the box office or browse through their online catalogue, found on the Cornerhouse website.
Bookshop open 12 – 8 every day of the week.

EJ Morten Booksellers

6 Warburton Street, Didsbury

Down a little cobbled street just off the main road, is EJ Morten Booksellers. Rather inconspicuously located within a 19th century terrace, the bookshop is surprisingly large on the inside, filled wall to wall with shelves and stacks of books. Morten’s houses an extensive range, from history and the classics to travel and science fiction, as well as a table of ‘bargain books’- enough to have me browsing for over 45 minutes (I even had a quick peek in the children’s section).
I was greeted by a lovely man in corduroys (an employee there for 23 years) who was more than happy to chat about the history of the bookshop and rather nicely spent 10 minutes helping two other customers find the perfect book on the lakes of Italy.
EJ Morten’s is the perfect place to steal away to on a Saturday afternoon after a cuppa in Didsbury, and have a good ole peruse.
Open 10 – 6 Mon – Sat, closed on Sunday.

Magma

22 Oldham Street

Situated on Oldham Street in the Northern Quarter, Magma is distinctive for its red-and-white signage, and posters instead of clothes or hair products in its windows. Part-bookshop and part-design-haven, everything in Magma seems to be a work of art. Walking in, you feel transported away from Manchester and its drizzle, and in to a parallel world where everything is instantly more beautiful and you are that super-cool person you always mean to try to be. The warm lighting makes you feel instantly welcome, and the space guides you in. The bookshelves line one side of the space, with magazines as well as amazing (and often useful) design objects on the other. Every book they stock is not just informative and intelligently selected, but also beautifully put together and an aesthetic object in its own right. Of course in many cases this is reflected in the price of the books, but the reasoning is perfectly clear. If you’re ever looking to treat yourself, buy someone a lasting present, or even if you just want to go and look at some beautiful things, Magma is definitely the place to go.

Open 10-6.30 Mon-Sat and 12-6 Sun.

Whitworth Park Oxfam

300-302 Oxford Road

A charity shop perhaps isn’t the most obvious place to think of when looking for a good selection of second-hand books, but the Whitworth Park Oxfam, placed so conveniently in reach of the university, gets a good number and range of donated books, on all subjects, that it’s always worth checking what they have in. The stock on display changes regularly, as more books are constantly brought out to fill the gaps left following purchases, and the shop tries to take back in to the stock room those books which have sat unwanted on the shelves for a few weeks. It’s impossible to guarantee that there will always be something worth buying, but if you make a quick visit every couple of weeks or so there’s bound to be something to get excited about sooner or later, which will make it all worthwhile. The pricing is always very reasonable, and you can be safe in the knowledge that your money is going towards good causes. What could be better than cheap books that also help others? Everybody wins.

Open 9.30-5.30 Mon-Fri, 10-6 Sat, and 12-6 Sun

2nd Hand & Rare Books

Church Street Market

This isn’t really a book shop. It’s actually a market stall on Church Street, opposite the Arndale Market. As such, it’s hard to say when it will and won’t be open, and given the lack of walls, it’s fairly weather dependent, but when it is, it’s definitely worth a look.
The first thing to note is that there is absolutely no method of organisation whatsoever. Just piles and piles of books, which for a booklover, is no bad thing. Personally, I quite like the chaos. Underneath all the rubbish – and there are a lot of bad books here – there are some good finds that make the rifling and rummaging worthwhile. It’s like the T.K. Maxx of bookshops.
It should be said, however, that ‘rare’ in this context doesn’t really mean beautiful, much-sought-after early editions of classics. It’s ‘rare’ in the sense of ‘odd’ and ‘unusual’ books. Books that, in monetary value, are completely worthless but are still old and interesting given their quirky titles. ‘Discovering Wrought Iron’, for example. It baffles me that anybody could manage to write an entire book on this subject, and then that somebody else would want to publish it, but they have, and they did.
I could happily spend an hour sorting through the piles of books here, and there is some good stuff. And the good news is, it’s cheap. Most books are about £1, and there’s a 50p bargain bin.

Open 9 – 5 Mon – Sat, closed on Sunday.

Paramount Book Exchange

70 Shudehill

There’s no other bookshop quite like this one in Manchester. Unlike most shops, Paramount Book Exchange is open only on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are organised alphabetically and cover a wide range of genres: poetry, theatre, literature classics and contemporary writers, science fiction, non-fiction and biography. There’s also a sizeable section for comic books and vintage magazines (not to mention Dr Who paraphernalia). It has beautiful old editions of books, and tucked away round a corner, a decent section of foreign language literature, including dictionaries and language learning exercise books.
Above all, though, this shop has character. There are random bits and pieces dotted around the shop and the shelves – pot plants, dolls, a rubik’s cube, toy cars, vintage postcards. A beautifully out of tune piano takes up one corner, and there’s a large sofa in one of the windows for customers to sit on and read. The background music alternates between Classic FM and old Sinatra records, and is piped at considerable volume outside of the shop as well, so in all likelihood, you’ll hear this bookshop before you see it. The prices of the books aren’t cheap, but it’s worth it to keep a place like this going.

Open 10 – 6 Mon – Sat and closed on Sunday.