The Missing Shelf is a decentralized radical bookshop - you can find our shelves at all sorts of different venues throughout Cape Town and Johannesburg, or online. We're different in a couple of ways:

We're decentralized.
Instead of piling thousands of books onto dusty shelves in a single space, we've decentralized our operations by hosting individually selected shelves of books in different venues - coffee shops, restaurants, clothing stores, independent music shops, events, your gran's 90th birthday party...you'll find us wherever you'd expect and sometimes even where you wouldn't. You can also buy books directly from our website, although we'd prefer you to go and scout out a couple of our shelves regardless :-)

We don't stock the kind of stuff you'd expect to find at other bookshops.
We want to change the world and we only sell books that we think will help us do that. What you'll find on our shelves, therefore, are books on sustainable living, permaculture guides, vegan cookbooks, stuff on how bad capitalism is, beginners guides to anarchism (which isn't what you might think it is) and even some stuff that's kind of highbrow and theoretical (without being too dry and boring).

We print some of our own titles.
Books are expensive and most South Africans can't afford them. We try to remedy that by reprinting important public domain, creative commons or anti-copyright works and reselling them as cheaply as possible. We also put a more modest markup on our imported titles than some of the mainstream shops do.

We're not doing this to get rich.
We're passionately committed to sweeping social and ecological change and we're happy to do our small bit towards achieving these lofty goals. If we earn enough to pay the rent and buy more books, and if we can foment revolution, or at least change a couple of minds, we're happy to keep on doing this.