Used Bookstore Near Me on Charing Cross Road: Henry Pordes' First-Edition Floors

Henry Pordes Books trades from 72 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0BB, and its Google listing shows it open Monday to Saturday from 10:45am to 7:15pm, with Sundays closed. Henry Pordes Books Limited was incorporated on 29 September 1983 and filed accounts made up to 31 January 2026 at Companies House in June 2026. If your used bookstore near me search lands you between Leicester Square and Cambridge Circus, this is the address where a £5,250 Keats first edition and shelves of used reading paperbacks share one shop.

Wikipedia's entry on Charing Cross Road describes the stretch from Leicester Square Underground station to Cambridge Circus as the home of the street's specialist, second-hand and antiquarian bookshops, and names Henry Pordes among them. Leicester Square station, on the Northern and Piccadilly lines, sits on Charing Cross Road itself, so you leave the station and walk north toward Cambridge Circus. The shop is on the ground floor, behind a plain frontage that is easy to walk past.

Tottenham Court Road, one stop north on the Northern line, is the other approach: walk south down Charing Cross Road past Cambridge Circus. The Evendo travel guide to the shop recommends public transport and calls driving a poor choice, because parking around this part of the West End is limited and expensive. Being entirely indoors, the shop also works as a rainy-afternoon stop between theatres, galleries and the Soho side streets.

The shop's own About page says Henry Pordes has been a famous name in the book trade for more than fifty years, as a seller of antiquarian, collectible and second-hand books. It is run by Rita Servidio, who has forty years in the trade, and it belongs to the PBFA, the Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association. The PBFA's member page lists Ms Rita Servidio and describes the stock as antiquarian, secondhand and remainders.

A 2011 profile on Bookstore Guide says the shop opened in 1983 and stayed a family business after Mr Pordes died in 1998, passing to his son-in-law and daughter. The same profile says customers often call the staff eccentric intellectuals, and the About page adds that they carry the whereabouts of much of the stock in their heads.

The shop's AbeBooks profile sets out the range: modern first editions, early classics including Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Wilde, Carroll and the Brontes, early editions of Harry Potter, James Bond, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Graham Greene and Terry Pratchett, and antiquarian texts on medicine, science, sport, travel, history, religion and philosophy. Italian and French literature, natural history, archaeology, folklore, cookery and drinks are also listed, along with children's books, especially from the 1930s.

Prices on the shop's own website show how wide the spread is. In the First Edition category, John Keats's Endymion, printed for Taylor and Hessey in 1818, is listed at £5,250, and Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince and Other Tales, published by David Nutt in 1888, at £2,800. A 1938 Collins copy of T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone is £1,350. At the gentler end, H.H. Cotterell's Old Pewter from Batsford, 1970, is listed at £45.

The shop's blog shows the stock rotating through modern collectables too. One post announced a run of Terry Pratchett first editions, some of them signed, including a signed first English edition of The Last Continent, and said the used paperback section had been restocked with reading copies of Good Omens. Another flagged first English editions of Stephen King's IT and Pet Sematary, and a third described three elusive William Burroughs titles, including the bilingual Ali's Smile: Naked Scientology.

For Reading Addicts describes the inside as a complete contrast to the ordinary shopfront: shelves run from floor to ceiling, with the upper rows given to old and antique books with decorative spines. A small stairway leads down to the basement, and the reviewer warns that the steps are narrow and winding. Down there you find more fiction and a run of folio editions, and the reviewer came back up holding Catch-22, The New York Trilogy and The Little Prince.

That reviewer called the prices low compared with many bookshops and was offered a student discount on top. Be realistic about the other end of the shop, though. The travel blog A Well-Read Wanderer says plainly that Henry Pordes is not the place to go for a bargain on antiquarian books, which are priced with knowledge of the collectors' market. Skip the high shelves if you are on a paperback budget and head straight for the basement fiction.

One more honest note on the stock: AbeBooks describes the shop's publications on art, design, fashion, photography and architecture as mostly an online selection. The website's Art category alone held 147 titles when this guide was written, but a visit is better spent on the literature, history and children's shelves than on hunting for a specific photography monograph. AbeBooks counts 2,114 listed items in total, including 751 first editions and 208 signed copies.

The shop's blog notes that, sitting close to the Phoenix Theatre during the Cursed Child run, it often welcomed tourists searching for early Harry Potter editions. Collectable British editions of the series have filled the window display and a section of the fiction collection. A reader quoted by Bookstore Guide said new stock cycled so quickly that he could visit twice a week and find different books, and rated the literary criticism and biography section the best of any used bookstore he knew in London.

Use the staff. The blog invites readers to ask to see the rare, early printed hardbacks rather than leaving them to luck, and Evendo's tip is to arrive with a specific title, subject or author so the team can help efficiently. Bookstore Guide quoted the shop as always interested in buying books, travelling almost anywhere for a tempting collection.

The 7:15pm close Monday to Saturday leaves time for a browse after work or a quick visit before a West End curtain goes up. Evendo's crowd estimates put July and August as the busiest months and January to March as the quietest, with the calmest hours before noon or after 5pm. Evendo says casual visitors tend to spend 10 to 20 minutes, while serious readers comparing stock stay much longer.

Sunday is the gap, because the Google listing shows the shop closed all day. The plan B is Skoob Books in Bloomsbury's Brunswick Centre, which calls itself the home of London's broadest selection of second-hand books and opens seven days a week, with Sunday trading until 6pm on its homepage. Skoob buys books by appointment only, arranged by email, so bring a list rather than a box.

South along Charing Cross Road toward Leicester Square, Cecil Court is a pedestrian street of Victorian shopfronts linking Charing Cross Road with St Martin's Lane. Since the 1930s it has been known as the new Booksellers' Row, and its shops appear in films including 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) and Miss Potter (2006). Cecil Court bookshops such as Sotheran's and Bryars & Bryars deal in rare books, maps and prints, so it pairs naturally with a Pordes visit.

North toward Cambridge Circus, the building that housed Marks & Co, the antiquarian booksellers at the centre of Helene Hanff's 1970 book 84, Charing Cross Road, still stands, and a circular brass plaque on a pilaster marks the site. The Phoenix Theatre, which the shop's blog calls a close neighbour, is on the same stretch, and the section between Cambridge Circus and Oxford Street is where Foyles keeps its flagship shop, if you want new books after the second-hand ones.

Henry Pordes Books Ltd, 72 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0BB. Hours on the Google listing: Monday to Saturday 10:45am to 7:15pm, Sunday closed. Nearest Tube: Leicester Square (Northern and Piccadilly lines), with Tottenham Court Road a walk to the north. Stock spans used paperbacks, a basement of fiction and folio editions, and antiquarian first editions. Listed examples on the shop's site include an 1818 Keats Endymion at £5,250 and a 1970 Old Pewter at £45.