Phuket Old Town

Bookhemian

Bookhemian closed in 2025. It was a second-hand bookshop with a coffee bar in it, at 61 Thalang Road, and enough guides still carry its opening hours that people keep walking up to the door.

Lead type sorted into the compartments of a wooden printer's tray, under the glass of a café table.
One of the tables. Phuket Old Town, 2018.

Some sites date the closure to August 2026. That is when Phuket101 posted a note about it, and others took the date from there. It had already been shut since 2025.

What was in there

Books on shelves floor to ceiling, a coffee counter at the front, and the room running back behind it. Second-hand for the most part, with art and photography face-out along the shelf edges and Thai translations among them.

The shop looking back from the door: coffee counter on the left, shelves down the right-hand wall, and the room running back to a doorway. A figure in the middle of the frame is scribbled over in colour.
The counter, and the room running back.

The tables were the reason to sit down. They were printers' type cases, the shallow wooden trays that hold metal type compartment by compartment, laid flat with glass over the top. Most still had the type in them.

One table had loose type out on the surface, and a stamp pad beside it inked in bands of colour, for anyone to use.

Close view of lead type lying face-up in the compartments of a wooden case.
Sorted by size, not by letter.

2018

We came the first time in 2018, with our daughter, who was five. They kept a guest book on the counter that anybody could write or draw in, and she did a page of it.

A child at a glass-topped table and a second person beside them, holding up a guest book page drawn in felt-tip with 'Happy New Year' and rows of hearts. Both faces are scribbled over in red.
The guest book. Anyone could draw in it.

The rest of the afternoon went on the table — picking letters out of the loose type and setting them into words, which is slow going with a five-year-old and the best kind of slow. A flat white, a mango smoothie over yoghurt, a croissant with a jar of jam.

We went back every trip after that.

A child reading at a glass-topped table below shelves of books stacked to the ceiling, an open sketchbook and coloured pencils in front of them. Their face is covered by a pink block.
Drawing at the table, under the shelves.
Flat white with a rosetta poured on top, in a dark brown cup and saucer, on a table of loose lead type.
The type was loose on the table under the glass.
Croissant dusted with icing sugar on a black plate, with a fork and a small glass jar of jam.
Croissant and a jar of jam.
Tall glass of mango smoothie layered over yoghurt with a wooden straw, on a table of loose lead type.
Mango over yoghurt, in the tall glass.
Stamp pad inked in bands of green, blue, red and yellow, on a wooden table scattered with lead type.
The ink pad, left out for anyone to use.
Thai edition of Karel Capek's R.U.R., the cover showing two robots in black and white, one holding a rifle.
A Thai R.U.R. on the shelves.
Someone standing in front of the bookshelves holding up a drawing, both covered over with a scribble of coloured pen and two smiling faces.
In front of the shelves.

Photographs, 2018. Faces covered over.

Don't make the walk

There's nothing to visit at 61 Thalang Road. Any guide sending you there for coffee, for books or for a table to work at was written before 2025, and nobody has been back to check it.

Nothing in the current coffee list replaces it: the books were the point, and no other café in the district has them. For the coffee on its own, two are worth the walk:

The rest of the cluster, with opening times, is on the coffee page.

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