Modern Book Depot

Agra has no legendary literary bookshop; it has a dependable old-timer instead, trading for decades on Taj Road in Sadar Bazaar. The shop is compact enough to take in from the doorway: school titles share the shelves with a respectable English fiction section and a run of books on India, plus stationery and a few souvenirs. What makes it worth the stop is the staff: they know their stock and go hunting for a request rather than shrug. Open roughly 10:30 to 21:30, which slots neatly into an evening walk through Sadar.

The city's long-standing bookshop, run by people who actually know their shelves