This article appears as part of the Herald Arts newsletter.

Acclaimed horror movie director Guillermo del Toro has been doing a great job of promoting Edinburgh’s independent bookshops during his stay in the capital.

While on location to shoot his latest film for streaming monster Netflix, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, he visited The Golden Hare on St Stephen Street and posted a picture to X afterwards. His verdict? “A magical bookstore.”

Then last week he was in Tills Bookshop in Hope Park Crescent in Newington, one of the capital’s many second-hand bookshops and for 40 years now a low-key literary institution in the city. Again, more pictures and more effusive praise (“Lovely stuff – just lovely!”).

If you know Mr del Toro’s work you’ll know his tastes turn very much to the Gothic and the macabre, so of course he was also thrilled to visit St Cuthbert’s burial ground off Lothian Road and see the grave of the literary stoner’s literary stoner – Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater, On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts and Suspiria De Profundis, the source for Dario Argento’s cult 1977 horror movie, Suspiria.

And so delighted was he by his first visit to the Surgeons’........

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