Tuesday March 19th, 2024
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AUC Bookstore: Back in Action

Bookworms rejoice! The iconic downtown book shop comes back to life...

Staff Writer

Long gone are the days when we used to head to downtown Tahrir square and walk into the AUC campus, right past all the students and faculty, and head into Cairo's most underrated gem of a bookstore. We remember getting lost in there for hours, taking our time to skim through the pages of some of the best and exclusively available titles in Cairo. As if the books weren't enough, the knowledgable and eager to help staff coupled with the reasonable prices of the titles made heading to this bookstore a treat that was unmatched and continues to be despite of all the recent chains of bookstores that are popping up left and right.

We remember getting our first Bukowski there, and falling in love with Dostoevsky to getting over our adolescent black wearing, clove cigarette smoking, vermouth drinking phase with some Camus. These days we felt were long gone until we heard of the reopening of our favorite bookstore: "The AUC Tahrir Bookstore on the university’s Tahrir Campus will celebrate its grand reopening on Monday 19 October. The entrance to the Bookstore on Kasr El Aini Street will open once again, for the first time since it was closed during the Revolution in 2011, and visitors will now be able to access the Bookstore directly from Tahrir Square," says an AUC spokesperson.  

“We are very glad because the convenient location of this entrance, right off Tahrir Square, will make it easier for visitors to reach the Bookstore,” said AUC Press director Dr. Nigel Fletcher-Jones, which is exactly our sentiment. “The reopening of the AUC Tahrir Bookstore is a long overdue and important event in Cairo’s cultural scene,” said AUC Press associate director for sales and marketing Trevor Naylor. “For forty years this store has been a magnet for locals and visitors alike and its return should really appeal to any book buyer looking for an extensive and varied selection of English-language books, whether general interest books for children and adults, or academic publications for students and scholars.”

Currently the AUC Press publishes 60 new books annually and offers more than 1,000 titles in print, making it the region’s leading English-language publisher. Its books are readily available online, in physical form, through the AUC Press website (http://www.aucpress.com), and in electronic form, through the AUC Press e-Store (http://ebooks.aucpress.com). They are also sold online through Amazon and AUC Press’s regional distributors.