This month’s issue of The Indie Insider is a special edition celebrating our favourite independent bookshops!

Featuring brilliant pieces on Lighthouse Books, The Common Press and News from Nowhere, we hope to encourage our readers to seek out and support local booksellers 💜

I’ve chosen to include Troutmark Books – rainy day haunt and student loan depleter:

Tucked away in Cardiff’s maze of Victorian and Edwardian arcades, Troutmark Books is a veritable treasure trove for book lovers of all kinds. The arcades themselves are well worth a visit; filled with over 100 independent shops, selling everything from vintage clothes to specialist cheeses and weirdly wonderful flavours of Welsh cakes, it would be easy to spend all day wandering the quirky corridors. Even after three years living in the city, I still found something new each time I ventured in.  

And Saturday city centre trips would always end at Troutmark. Peering through the windows of the black shopfront, beneath the red stencilled logo, you can see row upon colourful row of second hand books, stacked (often double) on floor-to-ceiling shelves. Their contents are eclectic: bestselling and niche fiction alike, comics, history, poetry, first editions, Welsh-language books, and an entire row of red-spined Vintage classics. One of my favourite sections is actually the corner of children’s books, where I’ve found many a forgotten favourite over the years.  

With the relaxed atmosphere, there’s no pressure to purchase – you are free to peruse for hours and leave empty-handed, though I have never walked out of the door with fewer than three acquisitions. On my last visit, I picked up an Isabel Allende memoir, a copy of The Borrowers and a beautiful Penguin Essentials edition of A Room with a View. High stock turnover means there’s always something new to discover, often a book you didn’t know you were looking for, and Cardiff’s large student population makes this place a godsend for thrifty English Lit students. You can find your entire reading list for a third of the price, often with helpful pencil notes included!  

It’s hard to ignore the threat conglomerates and online retailers pose to independent booksellers, but visiting somewhere like Troutmark is quietly reassuring, proof that the experience of a good bookshop cannot be replicated.