FT writers nominate awe-inspiring places to get your literary fix, from Mumbai to Buenos Aires:
“It actually began as a joke,” says Craig Walzer of Atlantis Books, the iconic shop he and five friends founded in the town of Oia on Santorini in 2004. An American studying abroad, Walzer visited the picturesque Greek island off-season with his friends and mused half-seriously about starting a store full of the literature they all loved. Thus, what began as a pipe dream – pieced together using shelving scavenged from Santorini’s beaches and junkyards, and books left behind in various hotels by travellers – is now a true bibliophiles’ destination. Based in a classic 19th-century Venetian captain’s house, the shop is a study in Cycladic perfection: whitewashed walls with azure-blue details outside and floor-to-ceiling shelves inside, crammed to capacity to maximise space. There is, of course, a sizeable Greek-interest section, including beautiful cloth-covered editions of The Odyssey (€22) – “on an island in Greece, it makes perfect sense,” says Walzer. atlantisbooks.org
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