Clarke’s Bookshop, Cape Town

Cape Town’s great Africana bookshop — a 1957 Long Street institution stacked with new, secondhand and antiquarian titles on Southern Africa, and the best free hour you’ll spend in the city.

The short version

• The city’s definitive specialist bookshop — on Long Street since 1957, deep on Africana and Southern African history.
• It’s a slow, unhurried morning in a great bookshop — one of those quiet luxuries, for the price of a paperback.
• Browse the Africana room, then dig the online catalogue — they ship, and they’ve supplied the British Library, Yale and the Smithsonian.

What is it?

Clarke’s is the bookshop people mean when they talk about books in Cape Town. Anthony Clarke opened it as a secondhand shop in 1957 and it leaned into Africana in the 1970s, and that’s still the heart of it: shelves and a dedicated back room devoted to Southern Africa — history, politics, art, fiction, the out-of-print and the genuinely rare — alongside a generous spread of general secondhand and remaindered titles. New books up front, antiquarian treasures behind. It sits in a handsome Victorian building on Long Street, the kind of corner you’d slow down for even if you weren’t going in.

Why go?

Because a slow, unhurried morning in a great bookshop is one of those quiet luxuries money can’t really buy you more of — and Clarke’s is the best place in the city to have one. No reservation, no dress code, no upsell — just good light, the smell of old paper, and an hour that’s entirely your own. You pull something off a shelf because the spine caught you, you read the first page standing up, you put it back or you don’t. Whether you walk out with a paperback or a collectible first edition, the morning was the point.

Good to know

• Address: 199 Long Street, Cape Town
• Hours: Mon–Fri 9am–5pm; Sat mornings — confirm on the site.
• Cost: Free to browse.
• Site: clarkesbooks.co.za
• Pair with: A wander down Long Street.

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