Booked Up. Favourite Manchester bookshops.

Self-confessed bibliophile, Matthew Hull, comes up with his top five favourite bookshops in Manchester

In four years wandering around Manchester I’ve found myself ducking out of the rain and into shops on more occasions than I can count – often into bookshops. Bookish staff never seem to mind a bit of aimless browsing or the casual thumbing-through of expensive volumes, and it feels only right that now and again I buy a book for the privilege of keeping dry. Now when I happen past any of these five bookshops, no matter what the weather’s like, it always feels like rain…

1. Magma

With its collections of limited edition t-shirts and cutesy manga toys it would be easy to write Magma off as pretentious, but there is soul to the place, evident in the considered selection of books on offer. Most of the titles focus on design, architecture and the creative arts and it was here that I came across Ellen Lupton’s Indie Publishing, which has become my own dog-eared bible. There are less technical gems to be found here too, amongst the twee animal print stationary, like J. Otto Seibold’s pop-up Alice in Wonderland, a great antidote to the recent Burton-directed monstrosity. Magma is a bright, shiny publishing trove – a sleek Apple Mac with a raw beating heart. Magma, 22 Oldham Street, M1 1JN

2. Paramount Book Exchange

Located in the scraggy west end of the Northern Quarter, you’re likely to hear the Paramount before you see it, as opera and jazz boom from speakers positioned above the door. A large part of the shop is stacked with crates of Action Comics, Picture Posts and vintage girly magazines with seemingly innocuous yet strangely ominous-sounding titles like Beautiful Britons and Health & Efficiency. Lining the walls is a remarkably egalitarian secondhand fiction section with classic, literary and genre titles sitting side by side in bookcases marked out with children’s alphabet picture cards – D is for dolly but also Dickens, Dexter and Delilo. Paramount Book Exchange, 25-27 Shudehill, M4 2AF

3. Sharston Books

Situated on an industrial estate in Northenden and resembling a carpet warehouse, Sharston Books would be easy to miss – but is absolutely worth making a pilgrimage for. Inside the shop’s corrugated walls is a labyrinth of creaking shelves and staircases and every spare inch of exposed wood is hung with antique mirrors or framed watercolours of storm-wracked galleons. Cubbyholes and rotary stands are filled with well preserved editions on any and every subject – true crime, winemaking, military history. It is the shop’s selection of conspiracy paperbacks that always distracts me, though; musty, yellow-paged books with garishly absurdist cover art and titles like Genesis Revisited and Tunguska: Cauldron of Hell! Sharston Books, Unit 15, Wearlee Works, Longley Lane, M22 4WT

4. Travelling Man

With its tillside bowls of irregularly sided dice and decks of foil-wrapped cards, the Travelling Man comic bookshop could be an intimidating prospect for the uninitiated. But instead of being sneered at, new customers are indoctrinated with honest, well thought-out recommendation cards and friendly service. The shop stocks a wide range of hard and softback graphic novels and trade collections, from heavy hitters Marvel and DC but also from smaller presses like Fantagraphic, who publish the deadpan masterpieces of Norwegian cartoonist Jason – whose works The Left Bank Gang and I Killed Adolf Hitler I can highly recommend. There are also separate pride-of-place stands promoting local independently produced comics. Travelling Man, 4 Dale Street, M1 1JW‎

5. The Art of Tea

Located at the back of The Art of Tea coffee shop and restaurant in Didsbury Village, not only does this secondhand bookshop have an excellent selection of titles but also boasts one of the most eccentric proprietors I have ever met, one who regales customers with Sinatra standards and appears from behind bookcases to pose maths problems. The organisation of the shop is also somewhat unconventional – old Penguin crime editions with banded green covers are placed next to biographies or histories because they also have green spines. As well as making the shelves look like a Dulux colour chart, this has the effect of making the search for a book an adventure; you may be looking for The Big Sleep but who knows what you might find getting to it. The Art of Tea, 47 Barlow Moor Road, M20 6TW

Matthew Hull is a student of creative writing at The University of Manchester and the co-editor of the Manchester based prose and poetry magazine, Bewilderbliss. Images (top to bottom): Susie Stubbs (Magma), Matthew Hull (Paramount & Travelling Man).

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