I have driven past this little shop which is on Stokes Croft many times and thought it looked interesting, but it is a bit too close to a rum part of Bristol for me to want to go in. I thought it would be full of horrible handmade stuff, because it is in a very boho/charity shop area. Just shows how prejudiced I am. This shop is paradise. It sells beautiful books with pop-ups or particularly lovely illustrations, it sells gorgeous notebooks and not a Moleskin (much as I love them) in sight. It has great prints. It sells small print run art books. And, and this is the best bit, it has the most wonderful range of magazines. So, it had the first English edition of Flow magazine, plus the usual favourites like Selvedge and Oh Comely. It has a wide range of arts magazines, and even the foodie magazine par excellence, Lucky Peach. There are also cards and washi tape and a few very well picked rubber stamps, but if you are a total print junkie like me, it is a paradise which hoovers money out of your purse very quickly.
The only downside is that the man who seems to run it is extremely shy, so I tried to start a conversation with him and it was clearly a massive effort for him to look me in the eye. He was nice, but I wasn’t going to get the story of why he started the shop and how on earth it keeps going. But if you live in Bristol and want a present for someone it would be a brilliant place to start. I will definitely be going back, even if parking is a nightmare.
Lucky Peach.
