Charity shop book hunting in Edinburgh
Edinburgh was the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature, and while that is the sort of accolade that usually means very little to a second-hand shopper, here it is simply a description of the housing stock. This is a city of tall flats belonging to people who read a great deal and have nowhere to put any of it. The result is a donation stream of unusual quality and unusual volume.
Stockbridge first
If Edinburgh has a charity shopping district, it is Stockbridge. The run along Raeburn Place and its neighbouring streets has long been the city’s standard recommendation for a charity crawl, and it earns it on two counts: the branches sit close enough to walk between without thinking, and the surrounding New Town households donate the sort of books that justify the walk. Start here. If Stockbridge is thin on the day, the day is thin everywhere.
The southern belt: Morningside and Bruntsfield
South of the Meadows, Bruntsfield and Morningside form the city’s other great strip — comfortable, established, and old enough that its estate clearances carry libraries assembled over whole lifetimes. This is where Edinburgh’s deepest stock surfaces: mid-century hardbacks, complete runs, the serious nonfiction of people who took evening classes seriously.
It is also where the condition gradient is kindest. Books from these households have generally lived on shelves rather than in boxes.
The student quarter
Marchmont, Newington and the streets around the university run the other Edinburgh cycle: term-time density, then a June evacuation as an entire quarter of the city empties its flats. The stock is younger, scruffier and more interesting than the southern belt’s — contemporary fiction, theory, politics, the books people actually argue about. Expect creased spines and pay accordingly.
What August does
Edinburgh’s genuine peculiarity is the Festival. For most of August the city’s population swells enormously, and then, over a few days at the start of September, it leaves — and a meaningful number of those departures involve people shedding whatever they cannot carry home. Add the ordinary student move-out and the result is a late-summer donation window that no other British city has in quite this form.
The flip side: during the Festival itself the shops are busy with visitors, and the good stuff moves fast. Early September, once the crowds have gone and the bags have arrived, is the connoisseur’s moment.
The Scottish shelf
Charity shelves here carry what the rest of Britain’s second-hand trade thins out: Scottish literature, history and poetry in real quantity, along with Gaelic and Scots-language material that simply does not circulate south of the border. If you have any interest in Scottish writing, Edinburgh’s charity shops are a better and vastly cheaper starting point than any bookshop.
A note on competition
Edinburgh is a city of readers, dealers and tourists, and its charity shops know it. Book pricing here tends to be a little more confident than in, say, Sheffield or Newcastle — not unreasonable, but not the flat-rate bargain bin of a small-town branch either. The compensation is quality: you are paying slightly more for stock that is genuinely better. Our notes on how pricing works apply, with the caveat that Edinburgh volunteers have seen a first edition before.
Shop directory
Empty, deliberately, until we have been round with a notebook. Edinburgh has more charity shops worth listing than most cities, which is exactly why the list has to be earned rather than scraped.
Until then: Stockbridge for density, Morningside for depth, Marchmont for the young stuff, and early September for the whole city at once.