Leakey's Bookshop: No Catalogue, No Problem

Right, picture this: a desk that looks like a bomb's hit it — teetering stacks of paper, half-drunk cups of tea, no order to any of it — and no catalogue anywhere in the hundred-thousand-book building. Ask Charles Leakey for a title anyway, and he's already walking toward the right shelf before you've finished the sentence. It's organised chaos, and once you've watched it work a few times, the whole place starts to make sense.

Walk in on a cold day and the log fire gets you before the books do — it's right in the middle of the floor, crackling away like it's been going since the building was still a church. Which, for the record, it was.

There's no catalogue. It just lives in his head.

Sam Leakey said it best to the Press & Journal: they don't keep a record of titles anywhere but in memory — they're just good at knowing, through familiarity, whether or not a book's in the building. Sounds implausible until you've watched it happen in front of you.

A Gaelic church that became Scotland's biggest secondhand bookshop

Charles Leakey started out trading from Grant's Close in 1979, before moving the whole operation into a disused Gaelic church on Church Street a few years later. Historic Environment Scotland's listing dates the building itself to 1792–93, with alterations by architect James Smith in 1822 — though you'll see plenty of places online repeating "1649," which actually refers to an even earlier church on the same spot. The oldest book in the collection, a Latin theological text from 1496, isn't even out on the shelves — it's tucked away in the family's own collection.

The Wigtown question

Leakey's calls itself Scotland's largest secondhand bookshop, and most visitors agree the scale and the setting are unlike anywhere else in the Highlands. Not everyone's sold on the value, though — one visitor, fresh from a happier stretch of book-buying in Wigtown, found Leakey's pricier and more crowded by comparison. It's a fair enough tension: a hundred thousand books in a beautiful old church was never trying to be a bargain-bin operation.

Before you go

It's open Monday to Saturday, 10 till 5.30, closed Sundays — worth knowing since the shop's own café closed a while back, so don't plan your visit around lunch there. Parking on Church Street itself is limited and pay-and-display; Rose Street car park is the easier bet if you're staying a while. Give yourself at least an hour. You'll want longer.

I still think about that desk. It shouldn't work — piles of paper, no order, a shop with more books than most people could count in a lifetime — and yet it's one of the most reliable systems in Inverness. Go on a cold afternoon, sit by the fire for a minute before you start browsing, and don't go in with a list. The best finds at Leakey's are always the ones you weren't looking for.