Gecko Books has operated near the Tha Phae Gate area for years with the same proposition: a serious used stock of English-language paperbacks and hardcovers, priced for travellers who want to read rather than collect. The shelves are dense and unsorted in the manner of used bookshops that have stopped apologising for their organisation. The art table at the centre is covered in decades of visitor graffiti — a kind of guestbook for everyone who has ever spent an hour here. The stock is genuinely varied: Southeast Asian literature, literary fiction, regional histories, the kinds of books that pass through a traveller-heavy city and accumulate into something interesting over time.
Old City / Tha Phae, Chiang Mai, Thailand