Littered with Books

Littered with Books opened in 2014 in a two-storey conservation shophouse at 20 Duxton Road, close to Tanjong Pagar MRT station in Singapore's Duxton Hill / Chinatown conservation district. Shophouses of this kind - narrow street frontages opening into long, deep interiors - are a protected building type from Singapore's early-20th-century mixed-use architecture, and the shop's layout follows that footprint, with shelving running back through the building rather than spread across a wide frontage. Rather than trying to be a general-interest retailer, the shop curates a comparatively narrow list across literary fiction, crime and thrillers, science fiction and fantasy, travel writing, and award-winning children's books, aiming for depth within genres rather than breadth across every category a chain bookstore would carry. It has been repeatedly included in local roundups of Singapore's independent bookshops, alongside houses such as BooksActually, as one of the city's smaller literary-fiction specialists rather than a general bestseller retailer.