Aurora Books

Like Southside, Edinburgh Books and Old Town Bookshop, Aurora Books sells an interesting mix of rare, secondhand and antiquarian books. Alongside first editions of Graham Greene and Charles Dickens, there’s usually a good selection of poetry, biography, plays, history and travel. Prices are in keeping with other specialist bookshops and last time I visited, they had a fantastic exhibition guide for Yorkshire painter David Hockney.

This is a bookshop that is able to offer a fairly wide selection of high quality books at fairly reasonable and not too overblown prices that you might pay elsewhere for similar books. That said this isn’t a bargain basement as it’s not just a second hand section of a charity shop where whatever gets donated ends up on the shelves. These are specifically chosen books which are put on the shelf not because they happened to be the ones the shop manager happened to have on hand, but due to their quality.
It is hard to describe the range of books on offer as there isn’t a specific reason or rhyme I could pick up instead it generally covers all the main sections of interest with books you may not be familiar with, but which are obviously good books. As a shop to browse through it is a great shop as there is likely to be plenty to suit you and you could easily kill a few hours as you look through all the sections looking for a gem that captures your imagination.