Harwich Old Books was originally established back in 1982 as Twentieth Century Books in Ludlow, Shropshire. In the mid-1990s we moved to a showroom in Norwich, and in 2003 we opened our latest shop in Harwich.

Our services: We buy and sell new, used and antiquarian books across a wide range of topics.

While academic and scholarly books are our main focus, we also stock a wide range of paperback fiction as well as children's books, popular history, and so on.

We can order any book that is in print (and find a lot that aren't!). We will send books worldwide at very competitive rates, and we welcome institutional orders.

We accept all major credit and debit cards, and also PayPal.

For details on where to find us and when we're open, please see the page detailing how to visit us.

Our home: The shop is spread over three rooms on the ground floor of a historic, Grade II-listed building in the town's conservation area.

The back rooms retain the late-medieval flavour of the original timber-framed building (ask us to show you the surviving carvings!), while the atmosphere in the Victorian front of the shop is quite different - this is a light-filled area, probably added in the 1880s, which served as a butcher's, greengrocer's and antique shop before we moved in.

A period mural outside the front door and the elegant windows are highlights of this stage in the building's evolution.

Other unusual features of the building include the 'rainback', a kind of well that was used to collect rainwater before the piped supply came to Harwich.