Why a city this size has so many bookshops
In 2013 Krakow became a UNESCO City of Literature, the seventh in the world at the time. That is not a slogan a tourist office invented. The city is home to the two big literary publishers, Wydawnictwo Literackie and Znak, to smaller sharp ones like Karakter and Ha!art, and to two Nobel laureate poets who lived and died here. What that means for a visitor is simple: you can spend an afternoon walking between bookshops that would be a destination in most other cities, and several of them let you sit down with a coffee and read.
This guide is for the traveller who wants more than a fridge magnet. Some of these shops sell used English paperbacks you can start on the train home. Some sell nineteenth-century Polish first editions you will only look at. A few are really cafés with a good literary conscience. All of them are within a twenty-minute walk of the Main Square, so you can do this on foot in an afternoon, rain or shine.
One honest caveat before you start. Krakow bookshops keep their own hours, small independents especially. Most open around 10:00 or 11:00 and close between 18:00 and 20:00, and Sundays are unpredictable because of Poland's shopping laws. Check each shop's Google or Instagram the morning you go rather than trusting a printed sign.
Massolit: the English-language reading room
If you read in English, start at Massolit Books & Café on ul. Felicjanek 4 (feh-lee-TSYAH-nek), a five-minute walk southwest of the Main Square towards the river. This is the best secondhand English bookshop in southern Poland and it is not close. Room after room of shelves, wooden floors that creak, a back garden room, and a café at the front selling coffee, tea and some of the better vegan cakes in the city.
The stock is genuinely secondhand, meaning prices are in PLN and range from a few złoty for a battered paperback to more for hardbacks and academic titles. There is a strong section on Polish and Central European history, Jewish studies, and translated fiction, which is exactly what you want if you are trying to understand where you are standing. You can sit and read anything before buying, and people do, for hours.
Expect it to be open daily, roughly late morning until early evening, but confirm before a long walk. Cards are accepted. There is no time limit on a table, which makes it the single best rainy-afternoon fallback in the Old Town that nobody puts on a rain-day list. If you only visit one shop from this guide, make it this one.
The antykwariaty: rare Polish books and paper
An antykwariat (an-tik-VAR-yat) is a secondhand and antiquarian bookshop, and Krakow's cluster of them is one of the densest in Poland. The heart of it sits in the streets between the Main Square and the Słowacki Theatre: ul. Szpitalna (shpee-TAL-na), ul. św. Jana and ul. św. Tomasza. Even if you cannot read Polish, these places reward a slow look, because they deal in more than books.
You will find pre-war postcards of Krakow showing streets you just walked, old maps, sheet music, first editions with the publisher's name in fading gold, and prints. Rara Avis, an antiquarian dealer that has long operated in this quarter around ul. Szpitalna, is the name to look for if you want rare and collectible material rather than cheap reading copies. Staff at these shops tend to speak enough English to help you find something and to explain what it is, though they are booksellers, not tour guides, so come with a specific interest.
The honest trade-off: prices at the antiquarian end are not cheap, and a rare Polish book you cannot read is a strange souvenir. Where these shops earn their keep for a visitor is the paper ephemera. An original 1930s postcard of the Cloth Hall, properly stored and a hundred years old, costs less than a mass-produced print in the square and is the real thing. Ask for "stare pocztówki" (STAH-reh potch-TOOF-kee), old postcards, and see what comes out of the drawer.
Bookshop cafés where things actually happen
Several Krakow bookshops are also cafés that host readings, launches and small concerts, usually in Polish but worth knowing about. De Revolutionibus Books & Café on ul. Bracka 14 (BRATS-ka), a minute off the Main Square, is the most central. It leans towards philosophy, science and serious non-fiction, has a good English shelf, and runs an evening events programme. The coffee is proper and the room is quiet enough to work in during the day.
Closer to Wawel, Bona Books & Coffee sits at ul. Kanonicza 11 (ka-no-NEE-cha), on the loveliest street in the city. It is a small, calm bookshop-café inside an old townhouse, with a carefully chosen selection of art books, translated literature and design titles, plus a courtyard you can sit in when the weather is kind. It is the sort of place you go to read for an hour, not to hunt for a specific title.
Over in the Kazimierz and Podgórze direction, Lokator is the one to seek out if you care about the literary scene rather than just the shelves. It is a bookshop, café and small publisher rolled together, and it hosts translation evenings, poetry and offbeat launches. It has moved location before, so check the current address on its Instagram before setting off. When there is an event on, it draws exactly the crowd of translators, editors and poets that keeps this a City of Literature in practice and not just on a certificate.
For brand-new books in English, temper your expectations. The Empik megastore on the Main Square carries a small foreign-language section, mostly bestsellers, and airport-style prices. The independents above are more interesting and often cheaper for used copies, so treat Empik as a backup for a specific new release you need today.
Where the Nobel poets fit in
Two winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature spent their last decades in this city, and reading them is the best preparation for these shops. Wisława Szymborska (vees-WA-va shim-BOR-ska), who won in 1996, lived quietly in Krakow until her death in 2012 and is beloved here in a way that is hard to overstate. Her poems are short, dry and clear, and translate beautifully, so a used English selection from Massolit costs little and travels well. There is a foundation in her name that runs the international Szymborska Award, and her bench-style monument has appeared in the city, though its placement has shifted, so ask locally rather than trusting an old blog.
Czesław Miłosz (CHESS-wahf MEE-wosh), the 1980 laureate, returned to Poland from exile and made Krakow his home, living near the river until his death in 2004. He is buried in the crypt of distinguished Poles at Skałka, which you can visit separately. His prose, especially The Captive Mind and Native Realm, does more to explain twentieth-century Poland than most history books, and the antykwariaty and Massolit both usually have him in stock.
Buying one of their books here, in the city where they wrote, then reading it on a café table a few streets from where they lived, is the closest thing this guide offers to a pilgrimage. It costs almost nothing and it changes how the rest of your trip reads.
Making a walk of it
A sensible half-day loop: start at De Revolutionibus on Bracka for a coffee and the new-books mood, walk north into the Szpitalna and św. Jana antykwariat cluster to handle old paper, then cut southwest to Massolit on Felicjanek and let the afternoon go. If you have energy left, Bona on Kanonicza on the way to Wawel makes a calm final stop. That is four very different bookshops, none more than fifteen minutes apart on foot, and no ticket required.
Bring cash as well as a card. The bigger shops take cards without fuss, but a small antiquarian dealer selling you a five-złoty postcard may prefer coins, and some independents have a minimum card spend. Bring a tote too, because Krakow charges for bags and you will buy more than you planned.
One last practical point about weight. If you fall for a stack of books, the main post office and the parcel lockers around the Old Town will ship a box home for less than excess baggage fees, and staff are used to travellers doing exactly this. Weigh the box against your airline's cabin allowance before you commit to carrying it.
Insider tip: the best time to walk this route is a weekday morning in the off-season, roughly November to March excluding the Christmas market weeks. The antykwariaty are calm, staff have time to open the map drawers and talk, and Massolit's front tables, which fill up on summer afternoons and rainy weekends, are yours. Ask at Lokator or De Revolutionibus whether anything is on that evening, because the Polish-language reading you cannot fully follow is still the most local thing you will do all trip, and admission is usually free.
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