Books
The best coffee with free book-exchange. You can swap your purchased books free of change every time you come in for a drink.
What is a book?
Books are folding paper things that smell like your grandparents and have printing all over them that doesn’t come off on your fingers. You can’t play games on them and you can’t watch girls dancing around in their bikinis on Chinese apps but they are oddly fun and dangerously addictive.
It was said by Edward Bulwer-Lytton that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ while he accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with one while putting on his chain-mail armour. And he was mostly correct, the literary word is fascinatingly inspiring and hauntingly dangerous. Books can stir ideas and those fancies can promote actions. And, it is actions that cause empires to fall.
But we don’t worry about all that, we just want to drink excellent coffee while reading the odd thriller about villains with only one testicle or romantic fiction about shy middle-aged running away with the handsome village simpleton.
Books do all of those things and everything inbetween and that’s just scratching the surface of why they’re better than phones by every single reasonable metric.
So come down and buy one. You don’t even need to plug it in, Apple can’t upload new software that will stop it working and Google won’t be looking over your shoulder and selling every word you read to insane billionaires.
It’s a win-win.
Science fiction and fantasy
Our personal favourite genre of books is sci-fi and fantasy. We have tirelessly scoured the internet, local markets, discount stores and closing-down sales looking for it. We have built up a small but respectable collection of books to offer for sale. We have the full collection of Divergent but please don’t judge us for that – we tried, OK?
If your bag is legends of dragons, murderous robots, cheap cash-ins from wobbly 90s TV shows and pseudo-intellectual nonsense about the nature of consciousness then you’re in good company.
Be careful – stock changes rapidly in this section due to the very poor availability.
Childrens
We have managed to source a surprisingly wide and diverse selection of children’s books. We were lucky enough to buy a large collection of Goosebumps books in as-new condition which even included an unmarked activity pack.
We also have a healthy selection of Captain Underpants and something called ‘Dog-Man’. Our UK suppliers have also sent us a very varied spread from ‘Jungle Book’ and ‘The Railway Children’ to more modern books by contemporary authors. We have some smaller books for younger readers and a few young-adult books for those with a burgeoning interest in developing their reading skills.
Our price range goes from $3.5 to $7 which means we don’t have many very small books for Kindergarten aged children. We are planning to develop this as opportunities arise.
Horror
Another genre we’ve really struggled to find is horror. I presume that most people who end up reading a Stephen King book just throw them into dustbin in dismay. Perhaps there is an entire hotel somewhere with his novels packed under the legs of wobbly tables but if there is, we haven’t found it.
As well as being difficult to source, this genre is probably our fastest selling and what stock we do have rarely stays on the shelves for very long. We still have managed to find a fairly decent spread that includes everything from The Vampire Diaries (I know, I know…) to James Herbert. We even has some classic Edgar Alan Poe, just for flavour.
None of these are reprints, they’re all genuine copies we’ve managed to find and they are rare so, if this is your thing, come and get them before they vanish into a dark satanic realm – or the luggage of a bored tourist, which is actually more likely, to be fair.
Non-Fiction
In our growing non-fiction section, we have such notable classics as a book on how chickens control humans, a Spike Milligan collection of doodles he made after running head-first into a wall (we presume) and books on how science doesn’t works how its meant to.
The backbone of our collection is made up of biographies, usually about people who have overcome some of the crippling hardship of being born without enough money to buy a Ferrari.
I should write one.
There are some very eclectic titles such as a Blue Peter travel guide from 50 years ago, several investigations into murders and trafficking and even a Christian guide to procreation.
There really is something for everyone in there – well for everyone who can read, presumably.
So if you desperately want to read the layman’s guide to quantum physics or discover how cats really control the universe then we might have just the thing for you…
Romance
Our romance section is stuffed full of some of the highest quality genre literature ever to grace the top surface of a shelf. And, being romance-fiction, it will probably stay on that very same shelf for a very long time.
Romance actually outsells all other fictional genres and our section is accordingly the largest single collection in our store. We have examples from such giants of the craft as Jackie Collins, Barbara Cartland and the woman that wrote Bridget Jones’ Diary.
Our extensive collection is bound to have something for everyone, whether you’re looking for a deeply engrossing journey of personal enlightenment or a trashy novel to read on holiday by the pool.
Crime and Drama
We have both a crime and drama section that are loosely divided into two, but with significant overlap. Crime, after all, is pretty dramatic – if you do it right.
Our drama section comprises of a wide selection of contemporary and historical narratives that include war, espionage and sometimes simply human interaction – which can border on the criminal if you do it wrong.
Our crime section covers the broad spectrum between simple robberies and goes all the way up to the dizzying heights of mass-murder. Even if you weren’t really interested in such terrible nonsense, if you read through our shelves, you’d have some pretty great ideas about how to get away with some very antisocial behaviour. But for those of us not affiliated with the British government, we can just enjoy it as simply fun entertainment.
We have some very rare and valuable books, some very old novels that inspires movies that were made decades ago. Check us out and prepare to be pleasantly surprised.
Literature and classics
What kind of book shop wouldn’t have a section dedicated to actual, proper literature? Well, let’s not getting to what kind of book shop we are and just offset the criticism by stating categorically that we do indeed have a section just for actually proper literary novels.
We have both real and genuine classics and some American ones, suitable for newer readers. From Gone With the Wind to the Great Gatsby, all the way up to the mighty William Shakespeare himself, we have a wide collection of books to challenge you with intellectual creativity and to make you think about what we truly lost with modern standards of publishing, education, politics, journalism…
Here, in a backstreet in Phnom Penh, is a little enclave of classical and literary novels to inspire, educate, entertain and challenge you.
Khmer
We have a small but growing selection of Khmer language titles. We can offer a diverse selection of books from business how-to guides to collections of stories. We purchased a stack of overstocked books from local publishers and are able to sell them in new conditions for less than half the intended ticket prices.
As well as being cheaper than other stores, we also offer the option on all our books to return it for a free exchange as often as you like.