Yesterday I spent the day going to many bookshops in London with a lot of book loving people. It was the London Bookshop Crawl which was organised by the wonderful Bex and it as so much fun!

Going into the Bookshop Crawl I didn’t know anyone. Bex had set up a Twitter list of the people who were going on the crawl so I’d followed them all to try and learn names and get to know some of them but really, I didn’t know anyone when I arrived at Foyles at 9:30am.

When I got there, there were already some people sitting in the café with hot drinks and pastries. After having a hot chocolate I went browsing the shelves of Foyles with Annette and Lauren, we talked about what genres we liked and recommended books to each other which was great. In Foyles I bought A Darker Shade of Magic and The Man in the High Castle – two books I’d been meaning to get my hands on for a while. I did start the crawl saying I’d only get one book per shop but that failed straight away!

There was about 25 of us who met at Foyles and once we’d finished there we all walked to Orbital Comics, one of my favourite places in London. Now I had to restrain myself in Orbital because there’s so many comics and trade paperbacks I’d been meaning to get for ages. After having about six trade paperbacks in my hands I managed to have some self-control and I just bought three. Princess Leia, Lando (who is my favourite character from the original trilogy and I really wish he was in the new film/one of his hypothetical awesome grandkids makes an appearance in the next one) and Lazarus Volume Four. I loved being in Orbital Comics and being able to recommend comics to people who weren’t as comic book savvy and being able to talk comic books with people who did know and love comic books. I love the fact that I managed to convince Ellie to pick up Five Ghosts and I hope she likes it.

After Orbital we sort of split up a bit and some went to Any Amount of Books while some went to the bookshops in Cecil Court and then we sort of swapped. I didn’t buy anything in Cecil Court, those bookshops were pretty much second-hand and antique bookshops. They were great to look around but nothing really caught my eye. In Any Amount of Books I bought The Secret Fire and Rebel of the Sands, they were £2.50 each and in perfect condition! I bought Rebel of the Sands because I’d seen it all over social media recently and I first picked up The Secret Fire because I liked the cover and then it sounded like an interesting read.

We then all split up for lunch and I had lunch with four lovely people at Ed’s Diner in between Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. The thing about the London Bookshop Crawl that I really loved was that we were all meeting new people and making friends. It was great spending an hour eating good food, talking about books and about our general interests.

We all met up again in Leicester Square and as the weather wasn’t that bad we decided to walk to Persephone Books aka my new favourite bookstore. We had a lovely talk by one of the women who worked there about how the shop and publishing side of things worked and she was happy to give suggestions. I picked Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf as my first purchase from Persephone Books. I picked that one for a number of reasons; it’s about a dog (and I love dogs), it’s short and I haven’t really read a lot of Virginia Woolf. It was my last purchase on the London Book Crawl.

After Persephone Books we walked to London Book Review and to be honest by that point I was getting a little book-ed out. Plus my feet ached from walking and my shoulders ached from carrying so many books in my backpack. It was great checking out a new bookstore and after that we all walked to Waterstones Piccadilly and that was where I took my leave, I said my goodbyes to Louise and Helen as I jumped on the tube back to Victoria and my train home.

It was a great day out meeting a bunch of book loving people and buying a lot of books. It was fun getting recommendations in genres I don’t know much about and just learning about books and authors that I had never heard of.

I’m so thankful for Bex for organising it and for everyone I met and talked to. I wish I’d learnt more people’s names but I’m sure I’ll be stalking people on Twitter and their blogs so I’ll get to know people even better. I think the London Bookshop Crawl was a great success and I hope there will be another one. It was a great day and even though I was mentally and physically exhausted by the time I got home (I’ve not met and talked to that many people in such a small space of time since Uni), I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.

Lando – Charles Soule, Alex Maleev and Paul Mounts
Lazarus Volume Four – Greg Rucka, Michael Lark and Santi Arca
Princess Leia – Mark Waid, Terry Dodson, Rachel Dodson and Jordie Bellaire
A Darker Shade of Magic – V.E. Schwab
The Man in the High Castle – Phillip K. Dick
The Secret Fire – C. J. Daugherty and Carina Rozenfeld
Rebel of the Sands – Alwyn Hamilton
Flush: A Biography – Virginia Woolf