Top 10 Bookshop Scenes

With A.B. Zax's delightful documentary, Hello, Bookstore, doing the rounds of arthouse venues, Cinema Paradiso thumbs through the tomes to bring you the best scenes set in bookshops.

Thirty year-old Matthew Tannenbaum took over The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1976 and, several thousand purchases later, he remains its sole proprietor. In Adam Zax's Hello, Bookstore, Tannenbaum looks back over his career while coping with the unique trading conditions inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Both a masterclass in customer relations and a treatise on the centrality of bookshops to small-town communities, this beguiling gem also celebrates the beauty of books and the joy and consolation of reading.

It's to be hoped that someone picks it up for release on disc, although the omens aren't good, as neither D.W. Young's The Booksellers nor Rachel Mason's Circus of Books (both 2019) were snagged. Executive produced and narrated by Parker Posey, the former provides a fascinating entré into the antiquarian book scene in New York City. By contrast, the latter profiles the director's parents, Barry and Karen Mason, who have run an iconic gay bookstore and sex shop in West Hollywood since 1982.

While cine-bibliophiles wait for this factual triptych to become available, let's consider the best bookshop scenes in screen history. And we say 'scenes' because entire films set among the stacked shelves are few and far between.

Read All About It

Few places are as pregnant with possibilities as a bookshop. Each volume has the potential to take a reader into a new world, whether it be factual or fictional, and either spark a passion or fire an imagination. Once upon a time, video stores offered the same transportational possibility and Cinema Paradiso serves the same purpose, albeit online and via your letterbox.

Considering how magical bookshops are, it's perhaps surprising that so few films and TV shows set the bulk of their action within their walls. But there are glorious exceptions like David Hugh Jones's 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), which chronicles the long-distance friendship between New York writer Helene Hanff (Anne Bancroft) and Frank Doel (Anthony Hopkins), the chief buyer at Marks & Co., an antiquarian bookshop in Central London. Produced by Mel Brooks (who was married to Bancroft for 41 years) and scripted from Hanff's memoir by Hugh Whitemore, this epistemological saga doesn't just dwell on books and the growing bond between the correspondents. It also provides a snapshot of the changing face of Britain between 1949-68.

Bancroft won the BAFTA for Best Actress, while Whitemore was nominated for his screenplay. Judi Dench was also cited for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Nora Doel. The film lives on, but the shop is now a McDonald's. The bookstore owned by Meg Ryan in Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail (1998) nods to the picture's backstory. As in Ernst Lubitsch's irresistible The Shop Around the Corner (1940), two people who are antagonistic in real life (Ryan/Margaret Sullavan and Tom Hanks/James Stewart) are unknowingly engaged in a charming private correspondence. Sullavan and Stewart were colleagues at the Matuschek leather goods emporium in Budapest. But Hanks is the scion of the New York Fox Books chain that seeks to put the independent shop that Ryan inherited from her mother out of business.

So good is the original story that is has been recyled in the guise of Robert Z. Leonard's In the Good Old Summertime (1949), with Judy Garland and Van Heflin, and David Wain's They Came Together (2014), with Paul Rudd's big candy corporation seeking to crush Amy Poehler's bijou sweet shop. Pleasingly, the latter includes a bookstore scene, in which the pair discover that first impressions at a party might have been misleading.

The first meeting between bookseller Henry Thacker (Hugh Grant) and movie star Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) goes somewhat better over the counter at The Travel Book Company in Roger Michell's Notting Hill (1999). Although he recognises her, Grant is markedly less starstruck than assistant Martin (James Dreyfus), who can barely contain his excitement. He gets saddled with a customer who struggles to grasp the concept of a travel bookshop by asking about Charles Dickens, John Grisham, and Winnie-the-Pooh. Perhaps writer Richard Curtis had in mind the bookshop sketch from At Last the 1948 Show (1967) that culminates in John Cleese sitting Marty Feldman on his knee to read Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying.

During William and Anna's first meeting, Rufus (Dylan Moran) tries to steal a guide to Bali by stuffing it down his trousers. Bernard Black would probably have been too disengaged to notice such behaviour in Black Books (2000-04), which Moran co-wrote with Graham Linehan of Father Ted (1995-98) and The IT Crowd (2006-13) fame. Set in Bloomsbury, the sitcom followed the weekly efforts of assistants Manny Bianco (Bill Bailey) and Fran Katzenjammer (Tamsin Greig) to get the misanthropic Bernard to be nicer to his customers and venture outside his shop. In addition to winning two BAFTAs, the series also won a Bronze Rose at the famous comedy festival at Montreux.

Staying on the small screen, Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) features in a couple of bookshop episodes in The Big Bang Theory (2007-18). In seeking a book on making friends in an effort to schmooze Barry Kripke (John Ross Bowie), he gets chatting to a small girl named Rebecca (Jade Zdanow) about Curious George. Later in the series, he mocks author Brian Greene at a Q&A session with Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik) for his attempts to make science accessible to the masses.

The Logos Bookstore proves considerably more sinister in the first season of You (2018-), which was adapted from a bestseller by Caroline Kepne. As subsequent series were produced by Netflix, it's not currently possible to see how serial-killing owner Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) becomes obsessed with aspiring author, Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). While we're in TVLand, we should also perhaps namecheck Buy the Book in Ellen (1994-98), Woman and Woman First in Portlandia (2011-18), and Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash in Comic Book Men (2012-18).

The service is considerably more personal in Isabel Coixet's The Bookshop (2017), which was based on a 1978 novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. Set in the 1950s, the story centres on Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a widow who comes to Hardborough in Suffolk to open a bookshop in the Old House. However, local bigwig Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson) had hoped to convert the premises into an arts centre and uses her influence to keep customers away. But Florence is helped by her young assistant, Christine Gipping (Honor Kneafsey), and reclusive bookworm Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy). If you're still unsure whether to rent this on high-quality DVD or Blu-ray from Cinema Paradiso, might we mention that this beautifully made film won the Goya Awards for Best Film, Director, and Adapted Screenplay.

Just Browsing

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why a film released on disc in the United States is made unavailable across the Atlantic. Obviously, the four region codes were introduced to limit where DVDs could be sold and the same goes for the three Blu-ray bands. But the supposition that audiences in other parts of the English-speaking world (or anywhere else for that matter) would not be interested in titles available in the United States is specious at best. Why, for example, should British viewers be denied the chance to see a film like Jack Conway's A Yank At Oxford (1938), when it's set in this country and has a largely indigenous cast?

The reason why we raise this issue is that MGM's Dreaming Spires romcom has a splendid bookshop sequence, in which Cardinal College undergraduate Robert Taylor gets to flirt with both married assistant Vivien Leigh and Maureen O'Sullivan, who is the sister of his campus rival, Griffith Jones. Why haven't more screen conversations been held through bookshelves between characters perched atop wooden ladders?

And speaking of US releases that would find a ready audience over here, how about a Region 2 edition of the three Warner Bros mysteries featuring Joel and Garda Sloane? This married pair were the Nick and Nora Charles of the rare book business and, by a quirk of fate, Harry Kurnitz (who invented the duo under the pen name, Marco Page), co-wrote W.S. Van Dyke's Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) and Richard Thorpe's The Thin Man Goes Home (1944) for William Powell and Myrna Loy. Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice play the Sloanes pursuing a stolen tome in Edward Buzzell's Fast Company (1938) before the mantle was passed to Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell for Edwin L. Marin's Fast and Loose and thence to Franchot Tone and Ann Sothern for Busby Berkeley's Fast and Furious (both 1939). The trilogy was released on a single disc Stateside. So what about showing a little Special Relationship reciprocity Dear Warners and releasing it on this side of the pond, pronto!

There's no problem accessing Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), which was the subject of one of Cinema Paradiso's 10 Films to Watch articles. As a member of the Polish Resistance in Warsaw, actress Maria Tura (Carole Lombard) goes to a bookshop where two Germans are buying postcards to ask after Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. She returns the tome to the owner (Wolfgang Zilzer) regretting that she can't afford 20 zlotys. But she has slipped a photo of Nazi spy Professor Alexander Siletsky (Stanley Ridges) between the pages, as well as a warning of the threat he poses to the cause. Clandestine messages were passed at another bookshop in 1942, as fifth columnist Stephen Murray assigns tasks to fellow travellers in order to sabotage the naval base at Westport in Thorold Dickinson's The Next of Kin.

Keeping Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) busy, there are two bookstores for the price of one in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). Raymond Chandler had based Geiger Rare Books and Acme Book Shop on premises on Hollywood Boulevard. Having popped along to the public library to do a little research, Marlowe asks Geiger assistant Agnes Louzier (Sonia Darrin) if she has a misprinted 1860 edition of Ben-Hur or a full set of Chevalier Audubon from 1840. When she seems nonplussed, he peers over his dark glasses and enquires, 'You do sell books? Hmm?' Marlowe receives a warmer welcome over the road, where the unnamed clerk (Dorothy Malone) has a much better knowledge of rare volumes and a keen eye for detail. She's also susceptible to a compliment and the prospect of spending a rainy afternoon drinking in the back room with a shamus.

Definitely worth a release on disc is Terence Fisher's The Last Page (aka Man Bait, 1952), a Hammer melodrama that stars George Brent as an Oxford Street bookseller with a crush on assistant Diana Dors. When she informs book thief beau Peter Reynolds that Brent has tried to kiss her, they decide to blackmail him. However, when he refuses to pay up, they recklessly send a letter to his weak-hearted wife.

Blonde assistants were clearly all the rage in the 1950s, as rebellious teen Juliette Hardy (Brigitte Bardot) is hired by a St Tropez bookstore in Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman... (1956). She would rather practice the Mambo with a colleague than become better acquainted with the stock. But, having cheeked the woman from the welfare board who considers her a disgrace to the orphanage where she resides, Juliette does lift up a small girl so she can reach a newspaper from a high rack.

Stanley Donen's Funny Face (1957) also comes to France. But not before Quality magazine editor Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson) and photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire) have descended upon the Embryo Concepts bookshop in Greenwich Village in search of a new look. They find it in Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), but she initially wants nothing to do with 'chichi' couture. After being locked out during the shoot, however, she tries to explain her philosophy while Avery helps her tidy up. But he leaves after kissing her on a ladder and she explores her feelings in George and Ira Gershwin's classic ditty, 'How Long Has This Been Going On?'

Torn emotions are also very much to the fore in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), as San Francisco cop Scottie (James Stewart) is detailed to shadow Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) and becomes intrigued by her interest in Carlotta Valdes. Artist friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) suggests consulting Pop Leibel (Konstantin Shayne), who relates a sorry tale at the Argosy Book Shop, which was modelled on Hitch's own favourite repository, The Argonaut Book Shop.

Suppressed passions were the order of the day for homosexual men in Britain when Basil Dearden made the landmark drama, Victim (1961). Although the focus falls on married lawyer Dirk Bogarde, the film's bookshop scene involves Peter McEnery, who is so terrified after stealing money because he's being blackmailed, that he seeks out former employer Norman Bird and pleads with him for help, while the older man tries to stall while boiling a kettle for tea.

Country girl Rita Tushingham probably sells tea in the Dublin grocery shop where she works in Desmond Davis's adaptation of Edna O'Brien's Girl With Green Eyes (1964). However, she's a bright girl and strives to befriend author Peter Finch, who browses the titles outside a bookshop and warns her about getting the wrong kind of ideas from reading books. Twisted notions drive the paranoid Earl Roberts (Peter Maloney) in Brian De Palma's Greetings (1968), as he enters the bookshop where would-be draft dodger Jon Rubin (Robert De Niro) is working and proceeds to badger the manager (Ted Lescault) with his theories about the Kennedy assassination and his claims to be the nephew of Lee Harvey Oswald's last landlady.

Roberts urges the manager to steal a book and meet him at the Statue of Liberty ferry. Shoplifting is also rife in Ken Loach's Kes (1969), as lonely teenager Billy Casper (David Bradley) half-inches a book on falconry from a secondhand bookshop after stealing a kestrel from a nest on a South Yorkshire farm. Driven by his love of Dashiell Hammett novels, Liverpudlian bingo caller Albert Finney hopes to land a more demanding case when he becomes a private eye in Stephen Frears's Gumshoe (1971). A clue takes him to the Atlantis bookshop in London, where he enjoys some badinage with assistant Maureen Lipman. She turns a blind eye to an elderly shoplifter and confides that the books on the occult are rubbish. Taking up residence in the café opposite, Finney waits for the owner (George Innes) to return. While interrogating him in the office after hours, however, a shadow on the door prompts Finney to bolt.

Although books are pivotal to the plot of François Truffaut's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1966), there are no bookshops in a futuristic society in which firemen like Oskar Werner burn books to restrict knowledge. The concept was revisited by Ramin Bahrani in 2018, although digitisation now makes the story seem quaint rather than depressingly sinister.

A bookshop in Halifax, Nova Scotia proves a lifeline for novelist Victor Hugo's daughter in Truffaut's The Story of Adèle H. (1976). Travelling as Miss Lewly, Adèle (Isabelle Adjani) heads to Canada to find Lieutenant Albert Pinson (Bruce Robinson). She runs into him in the bookshop, but he wants nothing to do with her. On discovering her identity, Whistler (Joseph Blatchley), the kindly bookseller who had provided Adèle with writing paper, offers her copies of her father's books, but she is not amused. Neither is Colette (Marie-France Pisier) when she finds a copy of Love and Other Troubles in a bookshop in Truffaut's Love on the Run (1979). This is the autobiographical tome that ex-husband Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) had started writing in Bed and Board (1970). She's dismayed by the inaccuracies she reads in his description of their relationship, but buys a copy anyway.

Bookstores also make regular appearances in the films of Woody Allen. He was an actor for hire in Martin Ritt's HUAC drama, The Front (1976), and John Turturro's Fading Gigolo (2013), which respectively set scenes in the Argosy Book Store and Schwartz & Sons. Alvy Singer (Allen) picks up a couple of books on death and informs Annie (Diane Keaton) that life is divided into 'the horrible and the miserable' in Annie Hall (1977). The Strand Bookstore cameos in the opening recitation in Manhattan (1979), in which Isaac Davis (Allen) and buddy Yale Pollack (Michael Murphy) also visit the Rizzoli Bookstore before Isaac spots a copy in a bookshop window of an exposé by his ex-wife, Jill (Meryl Streep), that trashes his reputation.

The Pageant Book and Print Store hosts the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) in which Elliot (Michael Caine) browses with sister-in-law Lee (Barbara Hershey) and insists on buying her a book of poems by e.e. cummings. Sadly, the shop is now an Irish bar, but Allen has continued to site scenes in bookshops, with Helena Shepridge (Gemma Jones) falling for occult bookstore owner Jonathan Wunch (Roger Ashton-Griffiths) in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), while the time-travelling rite of passage experienced by Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) in Midnight in Paris (2011) concludes outside the fabled Shakespeare and Company bookshop near the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Skimming Pages

Bookshops were comparatively rare in Hollywood features during the studio era. This could be down to the fact that characters simply didn't frequent them in times of economic hardship and war. But it could also be because dressing a bookstore set was time-consuming, while the tight rows of shelves left little room for the bulky camera to move.

Once location shooting with portable cameras became the norm, however, it was much easier to shoot in actual bookstores. Moreover, the paperback boom and the abandoning of the notion that every picture had to be accessible to all gave film-makers the licence to depict characters who were not intimidated by intellectual ideas. This didn't mean a glut of scenes depicting bookish types earnestly discussing dense concepts, even in art films. Indeed, books could be wittily employed, as in the post-bookshop argument between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's A Woman Is a Woman (1961), when they stop speaking to one another but continue scoring points through the titles of the books they find on their shelves.

Glenda Jackson is exasperated by Walter Matthau's Golden Globe-nominated antics in Ronald Neame's Hopscotch (1980) and despairs when the ex-CIA agent puts on a disguise to purchase a copy of his own scandalous memoir in a bookshop in the south of France. Back in Blighty, Jackson's children's author finds herself conspiring with meek bookshop assistant Ben Kingsley to liberate the turtles from London Zoo in John Irvin's underrated adaptation of Russell Hoban's bestseller, Turtle Diary (1985).

Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep meet while Christmas shopping in New York's Rizzoli bookshop Ulu Grosbard's romantic drama, Falling in Love (1984). Ten year-old Bastian Bux (Barret Oliver) also begins an adventure when he hides in an antiquarian bookshop while fleeing bullies in Wolfgang Petersen's The NeverEnding Story (1984) and borrows the tome that owner Carl Coreander (Thomas Hill) urges him not to read because it's not safe. But, while this inventive take on Michael Ende's novel has a cult following, 1984's kookiest bookstore scene came in Tim Abrahams, Jerry and David Zucker's Top Secret!, as American rocker Val Kilmer and resistance fighter Lucy Gutteridge find themselves in Peter Cushing's Swedish bookshop in East Berlin, where things run backwards and out of sync.

Having discovered the joys of reading in John Badham's Short Circuit (1986), robot Johnny Five (Tim Blaney) goes in search of 'major input' during a speed-reading rampage through a New York bookshop in Kenneth Johnson's Short Circuit 2 (1988). This is nothing compared to the carnage caused by Kelly McGillis and Christopher Buchholz in Peter Yates's The House on Carroll Street, when they meet in the Strand Bookstore in early 1950s New York to discuss his connection with some Nazi war criminals and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

Completing this 1988 trio is Joan Micklin Silver's Crossing Delancey, in which horizons open for Isabelle Grossman (Amy Irving), a young woman eager to rebel against her Orthodox Jewish upbringing, when she encounters Dutch-American author Anton Maes (Jeroen Krabbé) when he comes to give a reading at the New York bookstore where she works. The Personal Growth section of in the same city's branch of Shakespeare and Company provides the setting for the third meeting between Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan), when the latter's best friend, Marie (Carrie Fisher), notices someone staring at her in Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally... (1989).

Five years after the showdown with Gozer in Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters (1984), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) is running an occult bookstore that specialises in 'bizarre, somewhat strange, and hard to find books'. He's often visited by paranormal researcher Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) and TV host Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), who pops in to order Magical Paths to Fortune and Power in Ghostbusters II (1989).

A bookstore gets mentioned during a colourful conversation between shock jock-turned-videostore clerk Jeff Bridges and disabled war veteran Tom Waits in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King. But the fantasy is much more family friendly in 1991's other bookshop-related picture. During the opening 'Bonjour' number in Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise's Beauty and the Beast (1991), Belle (Paige O'Hara) returns a volume to the village bookshop and is thrilled when the owner (Alvin Epstein) lets her keep a favourite she has read twice before. Later, the Beast (Robby Benson) gifts her his entire library in an effort to please her. In Bill Condon's 2017 remake, however, Belle (Emma Watson) borrows the book from the local chaplain.

The bookseller is a more sinister presence in Philip Noyce's take on Tom Clancy's blockbuster, Patriot Games, as rare books dealer Dennis Cooley (Alex Norton) acts as go-between for Kevin O'Donnell (Patrick Bergin) of the Ulster Liberation Army and his British government source, Geoffrey Watkins (Hugh Fraser). Nightmare roommate Hedra Carlson (Jennifer Jason Leigh) also works in a bookshop and becomes frustrated when she calls Allie Jones (Bridget Fonda) and can't get an answer because she's sleeping with ex-boyfriend, Sam Rawson (Steven Webber) in Barbet Schroeder's thriller, Single White Female (both 1992).

Annoyingly not currently on disc (but by heck it should be), Mandie Fletcher's Deadly Advice (1994) reveals how timid bookseller Jane Horrocks takes the advice of five infamous British serial killers in order to deal with her domineering mother, Brenda Fricker. Just for the record, the agony aunt (and uncles) are Kate Webster (Billie Whitelaw), Jack the Ripper (John Mills), Dr Crippen (Hywel Bennett), Major Herbert Armstrong (Edward Woodward), and George Joseph Smith (Jonathan Hyde). The same year saw more ghoulish goings on between the shelves in John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, in which insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) seeks to know why readers go into frenzies when bookshops sell out of the latest volumes by cult writer Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow). In the course of his enquiries, he makes some bone-chilling discoveries about the novelist and the impact his writing has on its readers.

It starts so charmingly, with Salma Hayek softly singing to the slumbering Antonio Banderas in the flat above a bookshop. But creeping shadows presage a biblio-fire and an explosive showdown in Robert Rodriguez's Desperado. Of course, a fair amount of ammunition gets fired in Michael Mann's Heat (both 1995). But the bookshop interlude is part of the lull before the storm, as Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) buys a volume on metallurgy and is reading it when he meets graphic designer, Eady (Amy Brenneman).

Owen and Luke Wilson carry out one of cinema's politest bookstore heists in Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996), as they break in by claiming to have left things inside at closing time and proceed to commend the manager for doing his best when he only has paperback-sized bags to carry off the loot. Speed is also of the essence for Mel Gibson's cabby, as he goes on a fact-finding mission at the Barnes & Noble store in Manhattan in Richard Donner's Conspiracy Theory. Campbell Scott's mission to get a rare book re-bound proves less successful in David Mamet's con saga, The Spanish Prisoner (both 1997), however, as the Lexington Avenue bookshop owner informs him that he's got a commonplace edition that's of little value.

Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter) follows American heiress Milly Theale (Alison Elliot) to a bookshop in The Wings of a Dove, Iain Softley's adaptation of E.M. Forster's tale of grasping envy. And Bonham Carter also features prominently in Robert Bierman's reworking of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1997), which sees Gordon Comstock (Richard E. Grant) give up a well-paid job in advertising and take up a menial post at a 1930s bookshop while trying to become a poet.

In Robert Meyer Burnett's Free Enterprise, Robert (Rafer Weigel) and Mark (Eric McCormack) are seeking funding for their film about a serial killer who hunts down the members of the Brady Bunch when they bump into their hero, William Shatner, in a Hollywood bookstore. Trent (Jon Stewart) is an architect trying to win the heart of Meredith (Gillian Anderson) in Willard Carroll's Playing By Heart (both 1998). They meet at a bookstore he's renovating, only for a shelf to topple over and land on her.

Catherine Keener is subjected to a volley of abuse when she turns down an invitation to coffee from a man who refuses to take no for an answer in Neil LaBute's Your Friends & Neighbours (1998). She is actually going to meet art gallery lover Nastassja Kinski and there's more Sapphic passion in Anne Wheeler's Better Than Chocolate (1999). There's a bookshop scene in Rose Troche's lesbian classic, Go Fish (1994), but it's not on disc. So, we'll go with the LGBTQ+ bookshop in which Maggie (Karyn Dwyer) works when trying to prevent mother Lila (Wendy Crewson) from discovering she's dating Kim (Christina Cox). Further complicating the situation is Judy (Peter Outerbridge), the transgender partner of Maggie's boss, Frances (Anne-Marie MacDonald), who takes a shine to Lila.

As Joan Armatrading's 'The Secret in Me' plays on the soundtrack, Patrick (Heath Ledger) follows Kat (Julia Stiles) around a music-cum-book store and claims to be looking for Betty Frieden's The Feminist Mystique when she confronts him in Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You.

Kerry Fox is signing copies of her first novel, Sweet Lavender, when car-selling old flame Ray Winstone wanders into the bookshop in Kay Mellor's Fanny and Elvis (1999). Released the same year, Peter Ho-sun Chan's The Love Letter is set in the bookshop in the New England fishing village of Loblolly By the Sea. It's owned by Kate Capshaw, a single mother who is adored by old classmate Tom Selleck and younger man, Tom Everett Scott, who just happens to set the heart a-fluttering of shop assistant Julianne Nicholson.

Capshaw is intrigued to discover the author of a letter she finds among her stock. By contrast, in Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate (1999), rare book dealer Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) is tasked with authenticating a 17th-century tome that supposedly contains instructions for summoning Satan. His investigation takes him to the shop of elderly twins Pablo and Pedro Ceniza (José López Rodero), who convince him that their copy contains illustrations drawn by Lucifer himself.

Leafing Through

When Wiliam H. Macy and his crew fetch up to film The Old Mill in Waterford, Vermont, bookshop owner Rebecca Pidgeon forgets she has a fiancée and throws herself into helping bashful screenwriter Philip Seymour Hoffman with his script in David Mamet's small-town charmer, State and Main (2000). That year saw the launch of an enduringly popular TV series, with Stars Hollow Books being a favourite haunt of Rory (Alexis Bledel) and her friend Jess (Milo Ventimiglia) in Gilmore Girls (2000-16). All seven seasons and the 2016 special, A Year in the Life, are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.

A secondhand bookshop has a key role to play in Peter Chelsom's Serendipity (2001), as John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale meet in New York and, with a little help from Gabriel García Márquez, hit upon a unique way of exchanging phone numbers by trusting to fate. The presence of two novelists should guarantee the odd bookshop scene in George Hickenlooper's The Man From Elysian Fields (2001). However, most people will rent this overlooked curio to see Mick Jagger as the owner of the escort agency to which struggling writer Andy Garcia has to resort to feed his family.

It's safe to say that there is no bookshop quite like Flourish and Blotts. Established in 1654 and situated on the North Side of Diagon Alley, it's where Harry Potter bought the books he needs to study at Hogwarts. With shelves stretching ever upwards, it was also the scene of a Magical Me book signing by Gilderoy Lockhart (Kenneth Branagh), which was attended in Chris Columbus's Harry Potter and the Chamber of the Secrets (2002) by Harry (Daniel Ratcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron (Rupert Grint), as well as Mrs Weasley (Julie Walters), who has a crush on the author.

A Toronto bookshop has a crucial role to play in the resolution of Edoardo Ponti's Between Strangers, which centres on the emotional crises impacting on grieving mother Sophia Loren, photojournalist Mira Sorvino, and cellist Deborah Kara Unger. Wilbur (Jamie Sives) and brother Harbour (Adrian Rawlins) have their own troubles on inheriting their father's secondhand bookshop in Glasgow in Lone Scherfig's Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (both 2002). All seems fine when Alice (Shirley Henderson) moves into the upstairs apartment with her young daughter. But a dark secret threatens the quartet's happiness. Across the city, on St Andrew's Street, stands the 1950s bookshop where Joe Taylor (Ewan McGregor) and Cathie Dimly (Emily Mortimer) meet in David Mackenzie's potent adaptation of Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam (2003).

Another novel, this time by Frances Mayes, provides the inspiration for Audrey Wells's Under the Tuscan Sun, which opens with author Diane Lane being feted in a San Francisco bookshop before her life falls apart after she discovers her husband's infidelity and travels to Italy to consider her next move. Poet Naomi Watts had fled to France when she needed to discover herself. But her dream is crumbling by the time sister Kate Hudson visits in James Ivory's Le Divorce (both 2003) and there's little joy in her voice when Glenn Close coaxes her into reading some verses in a Parisian bookshop.

Bookshop owner Hajime (Tadanobu Asano), whose hobby is recording the sounds of trains, helps Japanese student Yoko (Yo Hitoto) find the café frequented by Taiwanese composer Jiang Wen-Ye in Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumière (2003), a cinematic delight that was made to mark the centenary of Yasujiro Ozu (who was the subject of one of Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert Guides) and directly references his masterpiece, Tokyo Story (1950). Also worth a release by a specialist label is Tetsuo Shinohara's Heaven's Bookstore (2004), which involves a struggling classical pianist who is dispatched to run a bookshop in the afterlife in order to work out the time before he is ready to be reborn on Earth.

Similarly deserving a UK release is Silvio Soldini's Agata and the Storm, which explores why Agata (Licia Maglietta), who runs a bookstore in Genoa, causes light bulbs and appliances to burn out. The vagaries of the world are examined with wry wit by Steven Spielberg in The Terminal (2004), whose look was inspired by Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967). Based on a true story, the action turns around Victor Navorski (Tom Hanks), a passenger from Krakhozia who finds himself stuck at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Among the friends he makes is flight attendant Amelia Warren (Catherine Zeta Jones), who discusses her fixation with Napoleon in the airport's Borders bookshop.

Bonaparte wouldn't recognise much of the Paris through which Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) stroll in Richard Linklater's Before Sunset (2004), the middle film in a triptych that's completed by Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Midnight (2013). They re-hook up at the iconic Shakespeare and Company bookshop, which would also appear in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia (2009), as Julia Child (Meryl Streep) begins a new life learning about French cuisine.

The Columbia University Bookstore gets a moment in the spotlight in Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), as Joel (Jim Carrey) goes to find the red-haired Clementine (Kate Winslet) at work. She bustles between the shelves warning him that she won't be a docile 'other woman' and he wishes that they could give things another try before each undergoes their memory erasure process. Perhaps he should look for a rare copy of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, as when bookshop clerk Jenna Mattison finds one in Shelley Jensen's The Third Wish (2005), she get three wishes.

This is currently on a shelf out of reach, as is Gaël Morel's Après lui (2007), in which bookshop owner Catherine Deneuve becomes obsessed with a friend of her dead son. But Cinema Paradiso users can indulge in Marc Forster's creepy thriller, Stay (2005), in which psychiatrist Ewan McGregor makes an important discovery in a New York bookshop about an artist who threw himself from a bridge in his race against time to prevent patient Ryan Gosling from committing suicide. Staying with the supernatural, nobody seems to be expecting John Cusack to give a talk about his haunted house guides in Mikael Håfström's Stephen King adaptation, 1408 (2007). But a smattering of people come to listen to his sceptical dismissal of ghosts, including a young girl who takes Cusack aback by asking him to sign, The Long Road Home, a volume from an earlier phase of his career.

Electronics store clerk Andy (Steve Carell) gets a crash course in talking to women from workmate Cal (Seth Rogen) in Judd Apatow's The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005) and he puts what he's learned into practice with surprising aplomb with a meaningfully meaningless conversation about DIY with bookstore assistant Beth (Elizabeth Banks). Carell has another pleasant bookshop experience, as widowed father of three Dan Burns in Peter Hedges's Dan in Real Life (2007). Mistaken for an employee, he gathers a collection of volumes that might help a customer finding something amusing to help defuse an awkward situation. Unfortunately, it turns out that Marie Diamond (Juliette Binoche) is the new girlfriend of his brother, Mitch (Dane Clark).

Author and opera lover Elizabeth Reaser runs into Justin Kirk outside a New York bookshop in Maria Maggenti's Puccini For Beginners (2006), although he has no idea that she is simultaneously dating him and his ex-girlfriend, Gretchen Mol. Musician-turned-jingle writer Martin Freeman is looking at books about dreams in Stephen Graham's store when he meets up with boss Simon Pegg and his mistress, Meredith MacNeill in Jake Paltrow's The Good Night (2007). At one point Pegg calls the shop 'a Hobbit hole', a joke that anticipates Freeman playing Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy (2012-14).

The browser in J.P. Schaefer's Chapter 27 has more sinister intentions. Mark David Chapman (Jared Leto) kills time in a New York bookshop and winds up buying an illustrated postcard from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, a magazine with an article about John Lennon, and the pen that he will hand the former Beatle to sign some albums before he guns him down outside the Dakota Building. Having chatted to daughter Lili Taylor about her problems, novelist Frank Langella stays in a New York bookshop in Andrew Wagner's adaptation of Brian Morton's Starting Out in the Evening (both 2007) in order to peruse an article by Lauren Ambrose, the twentysomething grad student who is writing a thesis that she insists will rescue him from literary obscurity. Publisher Aubrey Plaza has similar ideas about alcoholic recluse Michael Caine, when she takes him on a publicity tour to promote a long-delayed comeback novel in Lina Roessler's Best Sellers (2021).

While in town for sister Jennifer Jason Leigh's wedding to Jack Black in Noah Baumbach's Margot At the Wedding, self-absorbed novelist Nicole Kidman endures a distinctly awkward bookshop Q&A session with Ciarán Hands, with whom she's collaborating on a screenplay, when he asks a personal question about her latest book and, in reply, she mumbles an anecdote about an angry fridge repairman. An unwelcome face from the past intrudes upon Seann William Scott's success as a self-help author in Craig Gillespie's Mr Woodcock (both 2007), as he visits mother Susan Sarandon after a book-signing session and discovers she's dating his detested gym teacher, Billy Bob Thornton.

Dogcatcher Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) is given a book for his birthday about a detective named Fingerling in Joel Schumacher's The Number 23 (2007) and becomes so convinced that author Topsy Kretts has hijacked his life that he goes to a bookshop to find out more. A fact-finding mission also brings Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) to the Thunderbird and Whale Bookstore in Port Angeles in Catherine Hardwicke's take on Stephenie Meyer's bestseller, Twilight (2008), as she seeks a text on the Quileute tribe and its connection to Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson).

Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky opens with 30 year-old teacher Poppy (Sally Hawkins) riding her bike to a bookshop in a bid to cheer up the glum assistant (Elliott Cowen). Depression descends upon the secondhand bookshop owner in Yosuke Fujito's Fine, Totally Fine (both 2008) and his landscape gardener son has to take over. However, the daily routine soon brightens when he hires an eccentric female artist as his new assistant.

Lou Taylor Pucci also plays a damaged bookstore owner in John Hindman's The Answer Man (2009), who finds herself competing with single mom Lauren Graham for the affections of one-book scribe Jeff Daniels. A lonely, cat-loving bookseller embarks upon an obsessive love affair in Karen Lam's Stained, but the mood is markedly lighter in Stephen Frears's Tamara Drewe, an adaptation of a Posy Simmonds comic strip that includes an author signing at a Dorset village bookshop, complete with wine and cheesy nibbles. There's nothing on sale, however, like Alex Comfort's 1972 illustrated curio, The Joy of Sex, which amuses Ewan McGregor and Melanie Laurent when they find a copy in a secondhand store in Mike Mills's Beginners (all 2010).

Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) considers the bookshop run by Monsieur Labiche (Christopher Lee) at Gare Montparnasse to be the most wonderful place in the world in Hugo (2011), Martin Scorsese's enchanting adaptation of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret. However, Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is unconvinced and prefers the toy stall owned by her godfather, Papa Georges, who turns out to be none other than Cinema Paradiso's favourite film pioneer, Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley).

By all accounts, art director Dante Ferretti and set decorator Francesco Lo Schiavo lined the towering shelves with over 40,000 books. So, they rather deserved their Oscar. An actual location made life easier for the production team on Mick Garris's Bag of Bones, a mini-series based on a Stephen King story that sees bestselling author Pierce Brosnan at a signing while wife Annabeth Gish slips over the road to purchase a pregnancy test. Her failure to return sends the grieving Brosnan to a remote family property in Maine. But Francis Ford Coppola opted to shoot Twixt (both 2011) on his own Napa County doorstep, as Sheriff Bruce Dern corners author Val Kilmer at a promotional event at a small-town hardware store-cum-bookshop and convinces him to write about the area's connections with Edgar Allan Poe and vampires.

Stung by a bookstore clerk asking her not to sign copies of her work because it means he can't return them to the publisher when they don't sell, Charlize Theron decides to return to her Minnesota hometown and relive her glory days as a prom queen in Jason Reitman's Young Adult (2011). In Michael Mohan's Save the Date (2012, bookshop manager Lizzy Caplan is so knocked for a loop after breaking up with her boyfriend that she resists the efforts of Mark Webber to cure the fear of commitment that has been exacerbated by sister Alison Bree's forthcoming wedding.

Perplexed by the disappearance of the young woman he stopped from jumping off a Bern bridge, Swiss teacher Jeremy Irons goes to the secondhand bookshop where she bought a copy of Amadeu Inàcio de Almeida Prado's A Goldsmith of Words. Leafing through the pages, he finds a train ticket and his adventure begins in Bille August's Night Train to Lisbon. Towards the end of Paul Weitz's Being Flynn (both 2012), a poetry reading sees Paul Dano introduce homeless father Robert De Niro to his wife and baby daughter for the first time.

Bookshops link two alumni from the hit sitcom, How I Met Your Mother (2005-13). In Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts (2012), Radnor plays a writer who returns to his alma mater and falls for campus bookstore clerk Elizabeth Olsen, while Jason Siegel stars in James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour (2015) as flawed novelist David Foster Wallace, who is accompanied on a book tour by admiring journalist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg).

Having been put through the wringer after an indiscretion with a former student, Julianne Moore encounters his father (Greg Kinnear) at her favourite bookshop in Kingston, Pennsylvania and they discover they have much in common in Craig Zisk's The English Teacher (2013). In his typically succinct manner in Goodbye to Language (2014), Jean-Luc Godard, the nouvelle vague's enduringly terrible enfant, rails against technology by having a bookseller opine in 3-D that the world doesn't need gadgets and gizmos because Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn got by without resorting to Google.

A flashback in David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014) reveals Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Rosamund Pike) becoming amorous after discovering the Jane Austen section in The Last Bookstore, the biggest independent biblio-outlet in Los Angeles. Editorial assistant Emily Van Camp's past comes rushing back in Marya Cohn's The Girl in the Book (2015), when she's asked to promote a reissued novel by Michael Nyqvist, a client of her agent father whom she has known since she was a teenager.

In Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan, Barbie director Greta Gerwig discovers that independence suits her better than married bliss and gatecrashes a book signing to ask academic Julianne Moore if she wants to get back with her ex-husband (and the father of Gerwig's daughter), Ethan Hawke. Small-town Maine bookshop owner Griffin Dunne convinces widow Rebecca Hall that she needs help writing a biography of her late folk singer husband in Sean Mewshaw's Tumbledown (both 2015). However, she finds brash New York author Jason Sudelkis a bit much.

Back in 1980s Britain, the Gay's the Word bookshop is attacked in a display of homophobia in Pride (2014), Matthew Warchus's memoir of LGBTQ+ solidarity with the striking National Union of Mineworkers. And righting a wrong drives lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) in Simon Curtis's Woman in Gold (2015), as he is inspired by a cover while browsing in a bookshop that will help client Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) regain ownership of the Gustav Klimt portrait of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, that had been confiscated by the Nazis and subsequently retained by the Austrian government.

New York bookseller Anna (Dolly Wells) unwittingly turns biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) into a forger when she buys a bogus letter from entertainer Fanny Brice for $350 in Marielle Heller's Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). The Crosby Street Bookshop, East Village Books, and Logos Bookstore, as well as the New York Public Library, make appearances before Lee's scheme is rumbled by an antiquarian dealer named Paul (Stephen Spinella).

And this is where we must take our leave, as no one has yet had the sense to release Sergio Castellito's A Bookshop in Paris (2021), which was based on an unrealised screenplay by Ettore Scola and Furio Scarpelli. The director plays an Italian in the City of Light, who reads to wheelchair-bound daughter Matilda De Angelis in a bid to restore her interest in life, when not seeking to teach actress neighbour Bérénice Bejo about the pleasures of reading. It's a book lover's treat, but we hope we've also given you plenty of inspiration for your next Cinema Paradiso order.