Bookworm

Located in Gunshiyuan, Sanlitun Nanjie,Chaoyang District, the Bookworm looks like a large warehouse at first glance from the outside, but it’s a warehouse of knowledge. Though it’s the most active foreign language bookstore, library and restaurant in Beijing, some people just take it as a cafe with a rich collection of books, because they can also order a meal here when reading. Various simple meals and delicacies make you enjoy yourself.

The bookstore has a collection of 16,000 books, mostly original English versions from different English-speaking countries. You can buy or borrow with a membership card, or you can just read in the store.

At various time every week, the store holds all kinds of activities: puzzles, cocktail parties, classical music shows are weekly events. And it often invites some writers to meet their readers or or reading sessions.

At the end of 2010, the world famous travel book series Lonely Planet selected “Top Ten Bookstores of the World” in the latest book, Lonely Planet’s Best In Travel 2011, which includes the Bookworm headquartered in Beijing, the only bookstore of Asia in the list, which shows how popular the bookstore is.

Sanwei Bookstore

It’s a very time-honored bookstore located in Tonglinge Road, Xicheng District, opened in 1988 by a couple by the name of Li. The bookstore is full of cultural aroma and humanistic feelings, and thus has become a favorite place of intellectuals. There are two floors as one for social science books, and the other, for “saloons”. The bookstore hosts non-scheduled salons and lectures.

Search all the shelves and you cannot find common popular books by Jin Yong, Chiung Yao or Han Han. Instead, books by Machiavelli, Baudelaire, Wittgenstein and other less-known writers occupy the shelves. In fact, it has become a high virtual threshold of the store to keep part of the readers out. This is exactly the orientation of the study.

Comment from internet users: “The real version of Master Lu Xun ‘Sanwei Bookstore’ has being opened quietly in the Hutong for twenty-one years, a floor of which is half underground, surrounded by books of humanities and social sciences, academics and world masterworks.