Volume — a bookshop with a room you are allowed to sit in

A row of books standing upright on a shelf with coloured lights blurred behind them.

Fiction · reprint

The one everybody gave up on in 1994

Out of print for nineteen years and back in a paperback that is, for once, a good one. Six hundred pages and the first ninety are the toll you pay.

£10.99

A dark paperback with two bees printed on the cover, lying on a wooden board.

Poetry · new

Short enough to finish standing up

Forty pages. We sell more of this than of anything else in the shop and we have stopped trying to work out why. Read one at the counter before you decide.

£9.00

A long white desk against a floor-to-ceiling window with potted palms and a laptop.

Work · essays

Eleven essays about offices

By somebody who spent a decade designing them and has since changed their mind about most of it. The chapter on windows is worth the whole book.

£14.99

A pale room with a dark grey sofa, a low table and dried grass in a glass vase.

House · practical

A book about rooms, not about taste

Where to put a lamp, how high a shelf should be, why your hallway is cold. No styling photographs, which is the only reason we stock it.

£18.00

A plain yellow-washed wall with an uneven, chalky surface.

Colour · history

Two hundred pages about yellow

Pigment, poison, flags and warning signs. It is the sort of book somebody buys as a present and then keeps, which we consider a success.

£22.00

A wide city avenue between tall buildings with traffic lights and cars.

Cities · the unread one

Nine hundred pages about one street

This is the one none of us has read. It has been reviewed in four places, all of them admiringly, and none of the reviews made it sound enjoyable. Report back.

£30.00

The room

Six chairs, two lamps, a table and a radiator that works. It is free, there is nothing to buy and nobody will come and ask you. People do their homework in it, wait out the rain in it and occasionally fall asleep in it, and all three are fine.

Chairssix, two of them good

What it costsnothing

Wi-fiyes, the password is on the lamp

Phone callsin the street, please

Step-freeyes, both rooms

If you read the whole thing

And put it back, that is the arrangement, and it has been the arrangement since we opened. A book somebody read standing in a shop is still a book somebody read.

What we do not stock

Stationery, candles, tote bags and greetings cards. Four thousand titles is what fits, and every inch given to a mug is an inch that was a book.

Ordering anything else

If it is in print in this country we can have it on the counter in two working days, and it costs what it says on the back. There is no charge for ordering and no deposit, because in eleven years we have been left with fourteen unclaimed books and we sold thirteen of them.

Ring, or write it on the pad by the till. We will text you the morning it lands, once, and never about anything else.

Ring the shop

Six things we have read, and one we have not