Morr and Pippin, Booksellers

 Morr and Pippin, booksellers, have been a Swemmit institution since 1653. Owned by the Morr and Pippin families since 1785 - and found in the cobbled area of shops just outside St Tossock - it has provided reading material for the whole island for many years. It sells both new and second hand books, and is a vast shop. Some say it is four storeys high while others insist there's a basement and even an attic on top of that. Some have even found a courtyard deep within the cavernous rooms of books, but nobody has seen that place since at least 1963. 

There's a certain tradition in Morr and Pippin. They'll have what you're looking for and more besides. Traditionally you'll always find one treasure you never knew existed, and then find one even more miraculous volume that you will - always - accidentally lose sight of for a brief second and then never see again. Every time. Like something from a dream, you'll slowly forget what it was but only have the memory that it would have been the greatest thing you had ever seen remaining like steam after a great cup of tea.

The current owners are Sebastian Morr (bear, interested in gardens, history and hats) and Osiris Pippin (otter, interested in crime fiction, mysteries and the history of teapots) and are the latest in a long, long line of Morrs and Pippins to run the shop. For the first hundred years or so, the shop was owned by the mysterious Lady Ottilie Scubbard, a masked figure who weaves throughout the seventeenth century on Swemmit. She is linked to smuggling, hidden treasures, the disappearance and reappearance of St Robards abbey and the infamous theft of the then Swemmit royal family (the Blonwynns) most treasured possession, The Macpelah Scabbard. Over three hundred years later it has still not been found.

What is most mysterious that for the fifty years it was run by Lady Scubbard, and then her immediate acolytes, it was still called Morr and Pippin. It was as if she knew whose safe hands the shop would be in. And indeed the current owners have protected the vast collection - and the shop's many mysteries - with joy and wisdom.