Lily Wang (right) chats with a customer at her shop which has copies of rare, signed, and first edition books. Photo: The New York Times/Lam Yik Fei
Hong Kong is a difficult place to run an independent bookshop.
Rents are high and space is limited, but navigating the law has also become harder in recent years. China imposed a strict national security law on Hong Kong in 2020, and the government has also begun enforcing a dormant, colonial-era sedition law.
The laws’ ambiguous wording has raised questions about what material might be judged sensitive and in the wake of their enactment, public libraries have removed books on orders from government authorities.
In 2022, five speech therapists were sentenced to 19 months in prison for publishing children’s books that the court said violated the sedition law. Independent bookshops have struggled, with the closure of several locally loved spots, like Mount Zero Books and Bleak House Books, prompting tributes from high-profile writers and spirited goodbye parties.
But those shuttered shops, and others that closed, were not the last of their kind. Despite the challenges, some booksellers remain, relying on a blend of creative ideas, generous landlords and a reading community for whom beautiful rare books, or leaning piles of old secondhand books, still hold a kind of magic that feels special in Hong Kong.
Here are a few places to tap into that magic.
At Lok Man Rare Books, owner Johnston sources and sells particularly fine copies of rare and special books. Photo: The New York Times/Lam Yik Fei
Lok Man Rare Books
When Lorence Johnston was researching ideas for a business a couple decades ago, he realised that his adopted hometown, Hong Kong, stood out among major cities for its lack of rare-book shops. He was surprised, he said, given that the city “was the third largest financial centre by transactions” in the world. So Johnston, an enthusiastic reader who had never previously owned a rare book, set about equipping himself with the huge amount of knowledge required to navigate this scholarly world.
He opened his bookshop, Lok Man Rare Books, in 2006 and recently, it moved from Chancery Lane into a new, luxury-focused retail arcade in Pedder Building in the Central district. From this immaculate shop, with deep armchairs inviting long stays, Johnston sources and sells particularly fine copies of rare and special books.
His library sweeps literary genres – “I can’t focus on anything, so this is great for me,” he said – and while some of his customers are collectors, most come looking for gifts.
“They want you to find their favourite book or favourite three or four books, or the book that really influenced them to make a decision that turned their life in a different direction,” he said.
The shop has plenty to tempt the casual customer, though the prices are anything but casual, climbing from about HKD3,000 (RM1,715) to many times that amount.
Gentle Books
While running a stall at a flea market in 2023, filled mostly with vintage clothes and secondhand housewares, Diane Wang and Jessica Cheung noticed how many people were drawn in by the few books they had on sale.
“We said ‘What if we did just books next time?’,” Wang said. “Books are such an easy connector.”
Not wanting to commit to the overhead costs of a shop, the friends began asking around for book donations, hosting weekend sales at coffee shops with a tightly curated selection of English-language books. After they sold more than 100 books at their first pop-up – in the rain – in June 2023, the venture quickly developed into a fully-fledged project which, they wrote in their mission statement, aims to “build a circular book economy and nurture a community of readers”.
Gentle Books pop-ups, which Wang and Cheung advertise on Instagram, have a friendly feel. They are often held at Common Ground, a cafe on one of Hong Kong’s so-called “ladder streets”: narrow streets, made entirely of steps, which extend up the slopes of the Central and Sheung Wan districts. The area attracts a weekend crowd with dogs, and the books arranged down the steps provide another reason to linger.
Dionysus Books sells reasonably priced secondhand English-language books, all of which are donated, and new Chinese-language books. Photo: The New York Times/Lam Yik Fei
Dionysus Books
Stephanie Chong had quit a job she hated and was spending so much time each day doing her favourite thing – buying and reading books – that her husband, Samuel Li, eventually suggested they open a shop where she could keep doing what she loved.
The result of that idea is Dionysus Books, a small, quirkily decorated store tucked down a side street in the New Territories town of Sai Kung.
About 20km from the heart of the city without good transport links, the area has lower rents and attracts tourists in droves for the seafood restaurants and access to the surrounding beaches and hiking trails. Dionysus Books is now the only bookshop left in the area.
It sells reasonably priced secondhand English-language books, all of which are donated, and new Chinese-language books that Chong sources. She has a special interest in literature and history books that help narrate a rounded view of the world.
“I don’t think our mindset or what we think, who we are, should depend on the nature, on the concept of country or nationality,” said Chong.
The collection at Lily Bookshop is largely made up of donated books. Photo: The New York Times/Lam Yik Fei
Lily Bookshop
On the first floor of a building in Sheung Wan, near Central, the entrance to Lily Bookshop is framed by stacks of books waiting to be admitted to the crowded interior. The collection is largely made up of donated books, the majority in English, so embracing the nose-to-shelf experience holds the promise of finding any number of treasures once loved by all kinds of residents of the city.
Lily Wang, the owner, is a particular collector of antique books and has various rare, signed and first editions gathered around the shop’s cash register. You might struggle to find another 1967 Hong Kong directory in the city, for example, a tome with a Coca-Cola advertisement adorning the cover, and listings for everything from tram timetables to the governors of Hong Kong.
The shop, which opened in its current location in 2017, has a partner store around the corner, Flow Bookshop, an institution of Hong Kong secondhand book selling that first opened in Central in 1997.
Flow almost had to close in 2017, when the store was behind on rent, and a court order had frozen the shop’s assets.
But it was saved after the owner, Surdham Lam, appealed to the community for support. The two bookshops shared Wang’s space for a while until Lam split off his venture to focus on establishing a social enterprise, with the aim of lending out his books in Flow Bookshop in a kind of library system.
His simple mission, he said, was to prevent people losing “the habit of reading”. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
