Someone should make a game about: bookshops

Back in the 1990s, in that long-ago Pleistocene era when I was at secondary school, we were taken on a trip to the small Peak District village of Cromford. There, aside from pulling strange faces at bemused locals, we were regaled with stories of noted industrialist Richard Arkwright, who in 1771 snapped up a modest section of land in the village and built a cotton mill. People a lot smarter than me argue this was the birthplace of modern manufacturing – triggering a centuries-long chain that led to the creation of… well, pretty much everything we buy today.

But its significance to the industrial revolution is not why love Cromford. I love it for something much more prosaic: its fabulous little bookshop.

What a place.

From outside, Scarthin Books looks like any old shop from early in the 20th century. Nicely tessellated brick the shade of a rusk biscuit. Grimy, white sign with suitably old typeface. Stained awning to keep the rain off the heads of those ducking inside. Handwritten village notices plastered over the windows.

But head inside and you stumble into something special. Anor Londo. A Zelda dungeon. Yarnham. A dimly-lit maze of tall, faded bookcases filled with cracked leather tomes, oddly-placed pillars, twisting staircases with barely enough space to squeeze by, geometrically impossible rooms filled with old records and music sheets and oddities.