[mdp]

Which are the best physical bookstores, walled shops, "left" in the world? For "best", I mean those which still have a numerous collection, not just a selection: say, at least in the order of the 100'000 volumes stored for sale.

Thing is, it has become more and more difficult to find a bookstore as defined above. I see shops that offer no more than a few thousand volumes, sometimes even less.

It has become increasingly difficult to find a shop where you can ask for "Publisher Alpha, Collection ABC, Publication 456" and find it in the store itself. My experience was, in the past, to ask for some title and be replied "Are you joking? The publisher closed 30 years ago! Check in that shelf" - and find what I requested; this typical, once unsurprising pattern is getting less than uncommon.

The best bookstores of yore had shelves up to the ceiling and narrow corridors between them - like storage for libraries. Only a few are left. Can you help forming a list of the few remaining giants? Again: the requisite is, they should aim to have most of the available in-house. Hundreds of thousands of books is what I am used to in my reference places.

ALSO valid as "best" are those bookstores that attempt to contain exhaustively the publications of a single publisher: a bookstore that sells, say, 80% of what was published in the last three (or more) decades by, say, Diogenes, or Adelphi, or Odile Jacob, or Dorling Kindersley...

Fifteen years ago, paper books were norm, "mobile reading" used them for the most part and «gadgets» a special interest of «mobile geeks». Today, it takes tagging efforts similar to wildlife preservation ones to find simply a place to browse a collection (not a selection), check its items, cover the editions a country with some completeness...