Almost exactly one year and one week ago I finally had the pleasure of visiting the capital of Scotland.
For around 20 years I'd wanted to go to the Edinburgh Festival; for around ten years a bookshop in the city had been on my radar; I'd even got so far as to have had a holiday planned for spring 2020. What I'm trying to say is that writing about this bookshop a year after the visit is nothing compared to how long it took me to actually get to the city.
We finally got to Edinburgh as part of a summer holiday train journey that took in York, Edinburgh, Berwick-upon-Tweed and Hull. Which otherwise translates as two parkruns, four arts festivals*, one moment of quiet, many geographically distant bookshops and two quite heavy suitcases. It was a marvellous adventure, with this week's stop a special treat in the middle of it all.
Golden Hare Books is located in the Stockbridge area, around a ten-minute walk north of the festivals, or half an hour from our hotel in slightly out of the way (and vaguely cheaper) Haymarket. Stockbridge is a calm, quiet, village-like area that gave us a welcome morning of calm away from the crowds. The bookshop is found part way along an attractive warm grey stone street characteristic of Edinburgh, with a short flight of steps leading up to the front door.
Inside, this is another of those bookshops that's small in reality but feels spacious and welcoming with its warm, golden lighting. From memory, the counter where the booksellers were to be found was luxuriously long, helping with the feeling of room to manoeuvre. I left The Boy browsing the non-fiction here. My main focus was the second room, where the fiction was displayed on a central recommendations table and shelves around the walls.
The balance of the room with the surrounding bookshelves starting just above the height of the central table added to the feeling of space and made it easy to browse in comfort with only the minimal polite "excuse me" needed to pass other bookshoppers.
What can I say? I loved everything about this bookshop. It also contains a beautiful children's section, plus directly behind where I was stood for the above photograph was a wall of mystery books, beautifully wrapped with only a brown luggage tag descriptor to hint at the contents.
We both spent ages browsing. I wanted to buy at least half of the recommendations table and several more from the walls. The thought of the weight of our luggage was the only thing that kept me sensible and I still broke my one-book-per-shop rule because even though I was sorry to not be buying many of the books I'd looked at, I wasn't leaving without a mystery book.
As with the books, the memory of this bookshopping experience has also stayed with me. I hope it's not another ten years until we return.
Golden Hare Books
66 St Stephen Street, Edinburgh, EH3 5AQ
* As well as the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe, we also managed to visit the Edinburgh International Film Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival, which were all taking place at the same time. Edinburgh was very busy, making the calm of Stockbridge and the bookshop even more appealing.
