Last week a reader made me aware that there was a small bookshop located inside Al Bahhar Entertainment Village (Youm Al Bahar) called the Kuwait Heritage Library. The bookstore supposedly sold old hard to find books and since I was looking for a copy of The Kuwait Urbanization I decided to head there and search for it.
Youm Al Bahar is located in Kuwait City across from the House of Parliament. I hadn’t been there for years and don’t think much has changed since my last visit. The bookstore is located inside Youm Al Bahar and it’s pretty tiny with the books mostly being Arabic and only a couple of shelves dedicated to English ones. Most of the books in the shop are about Kuwait but I couldn’t find anything interesting in the English section. But, they did have a couple of glass cabinets with some of the really old books inside. I couldn’t find the book I wanted but I did find the book pictured above which is an original copy of the 1961 Kuwait Commercial Directory. The book was in decent shape for its age but the guy wanted KD150 for it which is around KD100 more than I would want to pay for it. I did manage to snap photos of some ads from inside the book which you can check out below.
There might be other treasures hidden in the shop but you would need to know Arabic and have a bit of time to flip through the shelves. The shop only opens in the evenings and if you don’t know where Youm Al Bahar is, here is the location on [Google Maps]
3 replies on “The Kuwait Heritage Library Bookstore”
Wow… that’s gold!
4 digit telephone numbers, Sabah-Up Cola, and Gulf Bank with 1.8 MKD capital.
Two things that caught my eye. First off, why is everything handwritten? Typewriters were very common back then.
Secondly, have you noticed the quality of the English in all the ads? Its almost like it’s from another country. Did they speak proper English back then? Remember they didn’t have spell check or grammar check. Maybe they only allowed native speakers to write advertisements, unlike now where most English signage is procured by asians.
typewriters were common true but typewriters had only one font and one size. by using calligraphers they were able to create type in different sizes and fonts.