What is your favorite bookstore? Free English Vocabulary Activity

If you could visit one of the following bookstores, which would it be?

When you think of a bookstore, you probably picture a building filled with books on an array of topics. But there are several bookstores around the world that will change this picture in your mind.

Drop by the University Press of France (Les Puf for short), in Paris, and you’re in for a surprise. Instead of seeing rows and rows of books, you’ll run into tablets and a large printer. The tablets contain catalogs of books. Customers look through the catalogs and decide which books they want to buy. Then, while they wait, the machine prints out their books. The machine is called the Espresso Book Machine, because most books can be printed in the amount of time it takes to drink a cup of coffee! Although Les Puf is less than 80 square meters (861 square feet) in size, millions of books are available.

Are you interested in the world of theater? The Samuel French Theatre Bookshop in London, England, only carries books related to theater. There, you’ll find a wide range of plays and theater books. Samuel French, one of the biggest drama publishers in England, has been publishing, selling, and leasing plays since 1830. If you’re looking for a play, you can browse the bookstore’s collection of more than three thousand scripts. For fans of musicals, the bookstore has musical scores and librettos. Aspiring actors can find many books about acting. There are also biographies of directors, actors, and playwrights – including England’s own Shakespeare.

Bart’s Books is an outdoor bookstore. It was founded in 1964, when Richard Bartinsdale moved into a house in Ojai, California, USA. Bartinsdale put bookshelves filled up with books outside his home. Neighbors would take books and leave payment in empty cans on the bookshelves. Today, Bart’s Books has hundreds of thousands of books outside and inside. People can sit around and read books in special outdoor areas. The books you find outside stay outside year-round, day and night. If you want to buy a book after hours, you just choose one from a shelf, and drop money through a slot in the door.

Which of these unusual bookstores would you like to stop by and explore?

Do you remember the second conditional?

If you could drop by one of these book stores, which one would it be?

If you stopped by with a friend, who would you take?

If you ran into a good book, would you buy it?

If you opened your own bookstore, what kind of books would you fill it up with?

If you could sit around and read all day, would you?

14 Most Beautiful Bookstores

I love books

5 Phrasal Verbs to Learn

To drop by

To stop by

To fill up

To sit around

To run into

Books & Mortar: A Celebration of the Local Bookstore

e-books

A visual feast celebrating the alluring power of bookstores—68 paintings by illustrator Gibbs M. Smith.

The local bookstore, a place of wonder, refuge, and rejuvenation for book lovers the world over. Books & Mortar is a celebration of these literary strongholds. Sixty-eight oil paintings capture these storefronts at a moment in time, and pair the artwork with quotations about the joy of reading, the importance of bookstores, and in many cases, anecdotes about the shops and owners themselves.

A delightful gift for an avid reader, an inspiration for any bookstore owner, Books & Mortar is the perfect keepsake for anyone’s personal library.

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