Book Therapy

Book Therapy is explicit that it is not a bookshop. It calls itself a place for choosing books that make sense, as a gift, as a gesture, as your offline therapy, and that distinction shapes everything reaching the shelves.

It does not sell thousands of titles. Each one is chosen on content, on visual quality and on whether it will still hold up in a decade. The shop works with publishers including Assouline, Taschen and Phaidon, houses it credits with defining contemporary visual culture.

There is no attempt to compete on catalogue breadth or on bestseller charts, because the shop was founded as an alternative to the mass bookseller. Its own line on this is blunt: we do not sell everything, it says, we sell only what we stand behind.

For a lot of customers that makes it the safe place to choose a gift. Two boutiques let the physical quality of a book be judged in person, and they are meant to be used alongside the online shop rather than instead of it.