Brilliant Bookshops: Persephone Books

The beautiful city of Bath is home to many treasures and one of these is Persephone Books. This lovely bookshop can be found at 8, Edgar Buildings. Edgar Building is an elevated terrace built in the 1760s which fans of Jane Austen will recognise as where the Thorpes lodged in ‘Northanger Abbey’. The bookshop manages to maintain a sense of the buildings history. According to their website, they ‘uncovered W A Williams's beautiful Art Deco decorative ironwork echoing the first floor 'balconettes' and the basement, where books are stored, is virtually unchanged with a beautiful original fireplace, a range, a bread oven, a Georgian dresser and York flagstones. And the first floor, the Persephone Parlour, is where they have ‘book groups, lunches, small concerts, informal film showings and seminars’.

Persephone Books reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly mid-twentieth century. One of the first things that makes this shop stand out as being something different and special is the distinctive dove grey covers. Each elegant book tempts you to pick it up only to discover that it has patterned endpapers, a colourful contrast to the cover. A bookmark to match comes with each title.

Persephone books offers 147 books, mostly novels, but also short stories, diaries, memoirs, poetry, gardening books and cookery. The shop is a lovely calm space, beautifully presented and well worth allocating plenty of time to exploring!

Persephone Books

8 Edgar Buildings,

Bath BA1 2EE