Forage around the shops lining St. John's Street, Trinity Street, King's Parade, and Trumpington Street.
Primavera, 10 King's Parade (tel. 01223/357708), is a showplace of British crafts, featuring pottery, glass, ceramics, jewelry, ironwork, and fabric crafts ranging from ties to wall hangings. Be sure to explore the basement exhibition of paintings and crafts items.
A posh area of extremely chic, small, and exclusive shops runs between Market Square and Trinity Street and is called Rose Crescent. Here, you can buy leather goods, smart women's clothing, and fine hats as well as jewelry and a host of very expensive gift items.
Another well-defined shopping district is comprised of Bridge, Sidney, St. Andrew's, and Regent streets.
For book lovers, Cambridge's bookstores will truly delight you. Heffers of Cambridge is a huge book, stationery, and music store with six branches, all of which can be contacted through one central phone number (tel. 01223/568568). The main store, at 20 Trinity St., carries academic books; an art-and-graphics shop has an address of 15-21 King St.; and the music store at 19 Trinity St. features classical, popular, and choral college music. Heffers also has a shop in the mall at Grafton Centre that carries new fiction and nonfiction titles.
David G., 16 St. Edward's Passage (tel. 01223/354619), hawks secondhand books, publishers' overruns at reduced prices, and antiquarian books. Waterstone, 22 Sydney St. (tel. 01223/351688), deals exclusively in new books on a variety of subjects. The Haunted Bookshop, 9 St. Edward's Passage (tel. 01223/312913), specializes in out-of-print children's books and first editions.
