Best Book Store — Used
Brattle Book Shop
Lucky for us, Boston has a plethora of dusty, lovably cluttered used-book shops — they’re the perfect stop on a walk home, or a place to while away rainy afternoons. But it’s unfair to even expect any of them to compete with the famed, antiquarian BRATTLE BOOK SHOP, isn’t it? It’s sort of like planting Radiohead in the midst of a battle of local garage bands. The downtown book store has been beloved by local bibliophiles, and a must-see for book-loving Boston tourists, since it opened in 1825. Its wooden shelves house hundreds of thousands of used, rare, and out-of-print books, maps, prints and ephemera. Nowadays, second-generation owner Ken Gloss has become something of a famed figure himself, as an old-book expert and appraiser, both at the store and on the popular PBS television program Antiques Roadshow.
BRATTLE BOOK SHOP | 9 West Street, Boston | 617.542.0210 | brattlebookshop.com