Avondale Book Exchange

I agree with the below review. Every village or set of shops needs to have a few things to make it a good block of shops, including a second hand book shop. This second hand book shop has been here for as long as I can remember, and was the only reason I would ever make the big trek up the hill from school to come into the shops for a look around. They’ve got books in there that you can tell have been there since the shop opened (I’m not sure when that was), but they also get some pretty new books in there every now and then. It’s a great place to build up your collections; lots of John Grisham. If you happen to be in Avondale, it’s a pretty good book shop to have a nosy.

Every block of suburban shops should have a secondhand book shop. It should be the criteria for a main set of shops: one dairy, one bakery, one proper fish & chops, one bookshop. By these standards Kingsland is not a real suburb, but Avondale definitely is.
The bookshop has been in the same spot for years, and it seems to me that at least in the time since I first started visiting very little has changed. I mean the stock does, of course, but the overall style has remained consistent and this, I think, is a good thing.
Along with the usual range of earnest history books and trashy paperbacks that every secondhand bookshop is obliged to have, this place also has (or at least did last time I was here; like I said the stock changes, as it should) a stack of comics, including some old British ones and some hilariously dated copies of Heavy Metal. Worth a look.