The Inner Bookshop is one of the UK’s largest independent specialist suppliers of new, bargain and secondhand books on Mind – Body – Spirit and the Unexplained. The main subject areas are health, psychology, personal growth, yoga, spiritual traditions, magic, mythology and mysteries. We have about 20,000 titles on the shelves, new, bargain and secondhand and a further 30,000 new titles available to special order only.

You can visit us all year round, Tuesdays - Saturday 10:00 am till 5:45 pm, except Thursday when we open 12:30pm to 8:30pm (not bank holidays). We have a lively worldwide mail order service which you can access by phone or through this website. Let us know if you would like paper catalogues, especially if you would prefer to order via post or phone - they contain a selection of the new and bargain books listed on this website.

If you cannot find the title you are looking for on our website or in paper lists, it’s worth giving us a ring. We are likely to be able to order it in for you; we have many years of experience in tracking down hard to get hold of books in our subject areas. If it is out of print we can flag it so we can let you know if we get one in secondhand.

The founding owner-managers Ruth Ashcroft and Anthony Cheke founded the Inner Bookshop in 1982. At first the shop occupied a tiny site in the Cowley Road, inside (hence the bookshop's name!) the local radical bookshop EOA Books, run by Jon Carpenter. EOA Books closed in 1989 when Jon Carpenter went into publishing, and the Inner Bookshop took over the whole site, which it soon outgrew. In 1992 we moved into our current, much larger, premises in Magdalen Road, Oxford. We have had this website since 1998, as an extension to our mail-order service. We have been upgrading it regularly and in 2002 added some of our major suppliers, available as Special Orders. This brought the total number of Mind, Body, Spirit titles searchable here to over 50,000. In early 2004 we upgraded our online database to SQL Server and as a result it is now 7 times faster to search through our books online. In early 2005 we upgraded our local inventory system allowing us to update the website more regularly, now bi-weekly rather than monthly. Also in the latter part of the year we added features like hyperlinked categories to aid in browsing the books, for those customers who weren't sure of title or authors. An example of this is the link below to our books on local interest:

Local Interest Books - Books about East Oxford, Oxford or Oxfordshire in general and The Thames Valley. These books are not listed on any of our subject pages but can be found through the Advanced Search Page.