Skoob Homepage

Skoob Map. Lift access, bespoke lighting, warmth, full air-conditioning and wonderful staff provide an excellent browsing environment. 10% discount for students and Wedge Card holders, also a new discount for cinema goers, see below.

Skoob is on Marchmont Street side of The Brunswick, between The Flash Centre and Waitrose’s rear exit. If you find yourself in the main concourse of The Brunswick, with chain stores and cafes all around, head straight through Waitrose, admire the cheese, exit and turn left. Camden Council’s builders have thoughtfully provided a neat scaffolding frame to our frontage, so you can’t miss us really.

We’ve filled over 600 requests for books from our catalogued warehouse in Oxfordshire so far. If we don’t have a book you require on the shelves, and it’s available in our on-line catalogue, we’ll get it sent to the shop, post-free, for you to peruse within a couple of days (depending on Royal Mail 1st Class services or when Chris is shuttling up the M40). If you want it you buy it, if not, we’ll find a space for it on the shelves. You can tell if the book you want is in the warehouse in the Search Our Warehouse page. A search here will check through 59,000 books that are ADDITIONAL to the books on our shelves. So if you’ve not found what you want on the web, that doesn’t mean it’s not in the shop. You can get down here and look, e-mail us, and we’ll have a look when we’re not busy.

If you're reading this site and have a specific interest, e-mail us and let us know. Bear in mind that there are some classes and types of books that cannot be economically accommodated in the shop. That doesn't prevent us from wanting to sell you them somehow.

In 2008 we plan to re-establish Skoob as the capital’s best second hand bookshop. We’ve had favourable comments from Time Out’s Shopping Guide and the mystery shopper from the TLS, but we’re always trying to earn more. Keep an eye on this website for progress, or feel free to add comments by e-mail or in our visitors’ book.

Cinema discount

The Brunswick has long been a destination for cineastes heading for the excellent Renoir Cinema. Refurbished and with a new lift it continues to offer both pleasant atmosphere and intelligent films. Some years ago we adjusted our hours to allow people to browse before going to a film. We are now also offering a 10% discount to Curzon Cinema card holders.

Chinese Readers

The new edition of Fang-Ling Jong‘s My Love Affair with Bookshops is now out. Written in Chinese, it‘s a very well researched and illustrated guide to notable bookshops. There is a section on Skoob and it would be nice to run a quote from the text, however we no longer have Chinese as one of our staff languages . Any Chinese reader prepared to translate for us will receive some reward.

Bookfairs

The Skoob bookstall has taken to the great outdoors − at fairs within The Brunswick, on Marchmont Street and in Queen’s Square in recent months. Rather more frequently, once a month at the Royal National Hotel, just a few hundred yards from the shop, there is a bookfair where we have a regular place.
If you are interested in books and perhaps haven’t been to a fair, the Royal National is a good place to start www.hdfairs.co.uk/book_fair. There is a large range of booksellers with immensely varied stock right across the price range (if you turn up in the last hour or so there are often bargains to be had).

We usually take books that we might not normally sell in the shop or online, often things which are slightly out of the way ...books with something about them, or those that might get lost or overlooked in a large shop section.
On the same day and currently just across the way in the Holiday Inn you will also find the PBFA Bookfair. There is considerable range here too, but with greater emphasis on Fine and Antiquarian books. You will see some splendid leather bound tomes as well as smaller more affordable fare, indeed a book a couple of hundred years old need not cost much at all. As you can see from their website, www.pbfa.org/Webtools/calendar.asp, the PBFA (Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association) hold fairs up and down the country.
The next date for the Bloomsbury fairs is Sunday 1st June, between Skoob and the two fairs you can easily spend a long afternoon browsing.

To the sheer delight of the book-loving community Skoob is back!

Cinema discount

Chinese Readers

Bookfairs