About BooksNest

A small shop that takes books seriously.

BooksNest has been selling books from the same side street since 2011. We keep a deliberately small catalogue — around thirty titles at any time — because a shelf you can actually stand behind is worth more than one you can't.

Everything here has been read by a bookseller. The recommendations are ours, the packaging is board-backed, and the notes in the margins of our shop copies are available to anyone who asks.

Browse the catalogue Visit the shop

The Power of Showing Up by Daniel J. Siegel M.D.

No-Drama Discipline by Daniel J. Siegel M.D.

How Computers Really Work by Matthew Justice

This month's window display

13: Titles in the catalogue
12: Authors we champion
10: Shelves in the shop
48h: Dispatch time

How we work

Four rules we don't bend

They cost us money regularly, and we have never regretted one of them.

Read before stocked

Nothing reaches the shelf on a sales sheet alone. If none of us can finish it, we don't carry it — which is why the catalogue stays at thirty titles.

Booksellers, not algorithms

Every recommendation on this site was written by a person who can tell you why. Ask us for something specific and you'll get a real answer.

Made to last

We favour sewn bindings, uncoated stock and FSC paper, and we'll always point you to the edition that will still look right in ten years.

A real shop

Forty square metres on a side street, open six days a week, with a table by the window that has never once been free when you want it.

Our story

Fifteen years, four shelves at a time

We have grown roughly once every five years, and shrunk deliberately once.

2011
One room, four shelves
We opened with a second-hand till, a borrowed van and about six hundred books, most of them fiction and most of them ours.
2016
The reading room
We knocked through into the shop next door and put in the long table. It has hosted 340 events and one wedding reception.
2021
Posting properly
We started shipping nationwide, and spent an embarrassing amount of time testing board-backed mailers until corners stopped arriving bent.
2026
Thirty titles at a time
We cut the catalogue rather than grew it. A smaller shelf means every book on it has someone behind it.