Famous Bookstores Around the World

These are the bookstores readers plan whole trips around, most of them shown from the inside: a carved staircase in Porto, a century-old theater in Buenos Aires, a Gothic church in Maastricht, a gondola full of books in Venice. Every one is a working shop you can still walk into and buy from, and each caption says where it is and what browsing there is like. The test for a place was simple: a shop famous enough that readers travel to see it, with an interior or front that lives up to the reputation. Libraries and open-air book markets have galleries of their own, so they are left out here.