Although the front part of this former record shop is now the Art of Tea, the Didsbury Village…read moreBookshop still remains in the back room! It's a great little shop that's crowded with endless rows of bookcases, each holding a huge variety of secondhand and collectable titles, including lots of coveted vintage Penguin paperbacks! For some reason, the shop also does a great line in books about classic Hollywood icons. I've picked up everything from straightforward biographies of Clara Bow and Jean Harlow to a slightly odd biography of Jayne Mansfield written by her psychic here! The prices aren't cheap at around £2 6 per book. But there really are some great one-off titles here that you'd struggle to find elsewhere. The man who works here is very chatty and will happily recommend titles to you. His mind seems to function like a human stock control system, too. So he can usually tell you whether or not there's a particular book in stock, saving you hours of rifling through the shelves!

Fantastic second hand book store at the back of the Art of Tea. Literally crammed floor to ceiling…read morewith books of all descriptions and in the type of environment perfect for rummaging through old books, especially when you have a couple of hours spare. This shop is situated directly behind the Art of Tea as part of a four piece (alongside zero and the Picture framing service) avant garde nod to commercial shopping. The perfect one stop shop for your creative needs and caffeine addled brains. Have a good rummage through the countless number of books (thankfully listed by style and subject matter) then pop next door to grab a brew and purvey your literary acquisition. I found a bargain on a Stanley Kubrick hardback perfect condition and sold for a very good price considering it's quality. This part of Didsbury Village is slowly but surely re emerging from years in the wilderness and this type of book shop is exactly the type of thing Didsbury currently needs.

this is one of the cutest thrift stores I have been in and I love the fact that they had a whole…read morebookstore on the other side separated between the clothes and HomeGoods, 10/10

Another day, another Oxfam, and another Oxfam that is 100% defined by its location. In this case,…read moreDidsbury. Home of the well-dressed, the well-heeled and the well-read. This wee shop takes in a normal Oxfam and an Oxfamm bookshop, and is jolly well stocked on all counts. To the bookshop first, which has a great window display of signed first editions. None of them hugely lucrative or historically important, but still pretty cool. Inside, the sections are clearly demarcated and all well stocked and, more importantly, alphabetised. The crime/thriller section is, as in all charity shops everywhere amen, very good; full of your latest Cornwells, McDermids, Ludlums and whathaveyou, as well as a brand new Charlaine Harris box set for £15 (the True Blood books, to the uninitiated). The general fiction section, too, is well-stocked, and te Literature section is modest but respectable. In glass cases around the place you will find rarer and older books, including an early edition of Pride and Prej for £100; nice if you're a wealthy person with an Austen habit. The other side, selling the usual second hand bric a brac and fairtrade shizzle, is solidly good, carrying a lot of Topshop, Pringle and Coast clothes, and a lot of jolly nice smart menswear. The homeware and bric-a-brac section is pleasingly mad. Wine glasses sit beside ugly china tat and Chinese urns. This Oxfam has a very convenient drop-off point; a well-manned back room that will happily take your bags of stuff, and help you to 'tag your bag' so that Oxfam can claim Giftaid on all the stuff they sell. Oxfam Didsbury; a better class of customer, and a better class of second hand stuff.

This is what book shops are about. there is a severe lack of old style book shops and being able…read moretio rummage on a shelf as opposed to knowing what your going in there for. Great selection and very helpful man who was working there.

My favourite bookshop by far! & Recommend to anyone looking for the nostalgic, truly serene…read moreexperience & pleasure of browsing in a book shop that only book-lovers and Literary minded people know and can delight in! Or ANYONE, looking for just about any genre of Books for any age to buy as gifts or for oneself, will find something or other they will be pleased to purchase! & What a wealth of books & happy experience of a bookshop !..that transports you back in time of recent decades.. thanks to its cosy, quiet & instantly welcoming, homely feel to it & above all, the polite, courteous & v. helpful staff to complete the bookshop's excellence! & reputation known, that we all maintain in our hearts well :) ! I have been going to this bookshop since almost twenty one years, :) when my Two Children, were only under five n half yrs of age. Thank you & Congrats!! to E.J Morten bookshop for being the Best !

If it was in the Northern Quarter, Deco would be constantly bustling with deejays and producers…read morelooking for new sources of inspiration. Tucked away in suburban Withington however, it's a bit of a well kept secret. I've only popped in a handful of times myself but each time I spent a good twenty to thirty minutes flicking through the racks looking for treasure. There's hundreds of CDs for the iPod generation and crates of lovely, dusty old vinyl for record collectors. As all the stock is secondhand, the quality varies record to record with the cheapest records usually being the most scratched or warped. Genre wise, Deco seems to have a bit of everything from pop and rock to funk, soul, reggae, hip hop and jazz. You're unlikely to find a rare Ornette Coleman or Karen Dalton album here but you could probably find lots of Ella, Louis and Billie. The first time I went I picked up a Kate Bush album I'd been after and the second time, a mint copy of Johnny Cash Live at San Quentin. Endearingly, Deco also sells the kind of secondhand books you'd find at Record and Tape Exchange in London. We're talking hefty rock biographies, contemporary fiction, crime fiction and the occasional cool comic book. As you might have guessed, I'm a bit of a fan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Ts4M3irWM

One of the things I miss about my South Manchester days is the collection of treasures it threw in…read moremy general direction. Sure, I'm surrounded by this sort of stuff in the Northern Quarter, but the jumble and bargains of Withington were pretty awesome. If you take a trip to the Post Office, bet you'll get seduced by Deco. This shop's achieved its five stars for me because even though I no longer collect DVDs, here they're mostly £3, which is technically cheaper than renting a movie for the night (after all, it is mere minutes from our apartment) - and you get to keep it! They're arranged by genre too which is lots of fun. Good way to test your definition of "horror" against someone else's. I was pulled in by the immense tractor beam of a selection of Cure LPs. I don't have a record player but have often toyed with the idea of obtaining one. Lo and behold, they sell record players. My friend snagged an old Bang and Olufsen treasure, similar to the one my father had. £40 and a fiver for a Cure album? Bargainous. And I never even looked at the books! If you're near Withington, you need to give this place a blast.

My gran had a frame made here for an old family potrait she had. They were very helpful and she got…read morea lovely fram. quite resonably priced too.

This is hidden at the back of the village book store which itself is hidden at the back of the Art…read moreof Tea. I struggled to find the place and felt I was being led on a wide goose chase. This framing service is run by a gentleman who's name I neglected to take down. Nonetheless he runs a wonderful, tiny cottage industry creating most types of frames for your picture requirements. I was awaiting a frame to be completed - a friend had created an oil painting on canvas he was then to have framed up at this shop. The quality was very high and for the price I couldn't see myself going anywhere else now. The cost was £30 for a bespoke, thick wooden frame which considering other places in Manchester (and online) is very good. Of course whilst waiting to pick the frame up (which he kindly completed earlier than originally agreed due to time constraints) you have the village book store, Zero records and the Art of Tea just behind you. As is often the case, you'll buy a picture/photo somewhere (usually hard to find pictures sourced online) and they often don't tend to come in standard sizes e.g. 5070 etc. With bespoke frames so well made and at a very good price here then you need worry no more. As it happens there is a really good picture/painting gallery right next door.

One of the most "retro" "vintage" charity shops I have ever been in. They have really made the…read moreeffort to make this charity shop stand out from the rest, and there are about 8 charity shops along this road in which we visited all of them yesterday but this is the only one worth reviewing! They have wedding dresses for £24.99. And not tatty old wedding dresses with things spilt down them, but proper heavy well designed fancy pants dresses in perfect condition. Almost made me want to get married just so I could buy them, not quite enough though. Seen all these new vintage shops selling old clothes for a small fortune? Well visit this Barnardo's and get the same stuff for less money with the knowledge a charity gets the money! Also a nice change - not walls filled with books, dvds and cds - only really old old stuff! Well worth a visit x