The Folded Page opened in 2019 because Nora Sutherland had spent fifteen years working in publishing and had grown tired of watching good books disappear. Not bad books — there are always plenty of those — but the quietly extraordinary ones that arrive without fanfare, sell modestly, and go out of print before most readers have heard of them.
Nora trained as a bookseller at McNaughtan's before moving into editorial work, and the thing she missed most was the conversation: the moment when you hand someone a book you believe in and watch them decide whether to trust you. That transaction — specific, personal, slightly risky — is what The Folded Page is built around.
The shop stocks around 2,500 titles at any one time. That is not many. A Waterstones carries ten times that number; Amazon carries everything. We are not trying to compete on range. We are trying to compete on judgment. Every book on these shelves is here because someone on the team has read it and thinks it deserves to be read again, by someone else, possibly you.
We do not stock books because they are bestsellers, though some of them are. We do not stock books because publishers have paid for placement, because we do not accept co-op. We stock books because they are good — which is a more complicated and more interesting criterion than it sounds.
Owner & Head Bookseller
Nora worked in publishing for fifteen years — first at a small literary press, then as a commissioning editor at a larger house — before concluding that she would rather sell books than acquire them. She opened The Folded Page in 2019. Her sections are literary fiction, translated fiction, and Scottish writing. She reads slowly and recommends carefully.
Bookseller
Alasdair joined the shop in 2021 after a decade teaching secondary English in Fife. He is responsible for the history, biography, and politics sections, and for the handwritten shelf notes that customers photograph and send to each other. He has strong opinions about footnotes.
Bookseller
Marta came to Edinburgh from Kraków to study comparative literature and stayed, which Edinburgh has a habit of causing. She looks after the children's section, the poetry shelves, and the shop's relationships with publishers of translated fiction. She is the reason we stock so much Central European literature, and we are grateful for it.
Shop Cat
Wickbe arrived in the winter of 2020 as a stray and has since made himself indispensable, in the way that cats do without actually doing anything. He is named after Thomas Bewick, the engraver, on the grounds that he is small, precise, and occasionally sharp. He sleeps on the poetry shelves and has never, to our knowledge, read anything.
A bookshop that stocks everything is a warehouse. We stock around 2,500 titles — chosen, not accumulated. If a book is on these shelves, it is because we put it there deliberately. That is the only promise we make, and we take it seriously.
Roughly a third of our stock is fiction in translation. This is not a political statement. It is a reading preference: the world is large, and most of it is not written in English. We work closely with independent publishers — Fitzcarraldo, Charco, Peirene, And Other Stories — who share this view.
We have chairs. We have a kettle. We do not mind if you sit down with a book before you decide whether to buy it. A bookshop that makes you feel unwelcome for reading is not doing its job. We are doing our job.