If you're fiending for the likes of City Lights, Powell's, Tattered Cover, or Shakespeare and Co, Halper's Books is Tel Aviv's answer. Prepare to spend whole afternoons crouched in the shop's narrow, maze-like aisles, amidst the welcome smell of books stationed in a random alleyway off of Allenby Street. Owner Yosef Halper, an American expat, has been buying out collectors and libraries for over 25 years, filling his lovingly well-worn shelves with everything from vintage sci-fi to detective thrillers and travel memoirs. Uncover a whopping 60,000 used books in English, Hebrew and Spanish with a peppering of German, Yiddish and Italian titles, and happily get lost in their printed pages.
Once a reader, always a reader. No matter where in the world life takes you, or how uncertain your life may be, there is always one constant you can count on: literature. Nothing can beat lying down in the grass at Park HaYarkon or curling up at Charles Clore on the way to Jaffa for an afternoon read. Explore the never-ending aisles of these Tel Aviv bookstores and come out with a treasure or two; some stores like Halper’s (on Allenby) even do buybacks, so you can keep your brain pumping and fingers page flipping.
