Five minutes of walking and four hundred years of reading. This is the literary pocket of the old city: a medieval courtyard hidden behind a plain door, and the square the booksellers have held since the stalls were thrown out of the Botermarkt.
Start on the Spui and find the unmarked gate into the Begijnhof. Inside is a courtyard the modern city never reached — lawn, low houses, a Catholic chapel that spent two centuries pretending not to be one, and Het Houten Huis, the oldest house in Amsterdam, leaning slightly as wooden things do. The notices ask for quiet. They mean it, and they're right. Circle the green once, look in at the Engelse Kerk if it's open, and come back out the way you came.
Then the books. The Spui is two minutes away and two bookshops deep: the Athenaeum with its newsstand, the American Book Center across the square. On a Friday the second-hand boekenmarkt sets up between them. Buy something. The Rokin metro is under your feet for the ride home, but you'll want to sit on a bench and start reading first.
