Before the advent of Zhongshuge, Zhongshu Bookstore was a well-known teaching bookstore in Shanghai, with 21 branches in its heyday. With the mass closure of brick-and-mortar bookstores, Zhongshu Bookstore began to seek transformation. In 2013, Zhongshu Bookstore's first high-end bookstore, Zhongshuge, opened in Thames Town in Songjiang New Town, and quickly gained the reputation of "the most beautiful bookstore in Shanghai".

Zhongshuge currently has many branches in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, Chengdu, Suzhou, Wuxi and other cities, each with its own characteristics. One of the most well-known is the Thames Town store, which is the starting point of Zhongshuge. Located on a street corner in Thames Town, Zhongshuge has a European-style architecture that harmonizes with its surroundings. The interior design of Zhongshuge is to give full play to the decorative attributes of books, from the ground to the stairs, full of real books, everywhere, as far as the eye can see, all are books, a sense of strayed into the library spontaneously. On the second floor, the mirrored space is dreamy, with bookshelves extending from the ground to the curved walls, and the design theme of "Books in Heaven and Books" could not be more appropriate.

On the 4th floor of Rui Ou Department Store in the center of the city, there is also a Zhongshuge store, which is different from the spacious Songjiang store and Minhang store, and the Jing'an store has limited space, but it is also very ingenious in design. The most distinctive feature of Zhongshuge Jing'an store is the reading corridor, which is limited by the narrow space and the books cannot be widened around; Then it extends upwards, and the ceiling is made of patches of glass, and visually, the bookshelves seem to grow upwards infinitely.

At the entrance, Zhongshuge clearly displays the latest main books and best-selling books, and most of the books provide sample books for trial reading, which is very convenient to choose books. In terms of book selection, Zhong Shuge basically covers all genres, from historical and philosophical collections, pure literature, life aesthetics, to economics and management, and food books, basically everyone can find books of interest here.

The exquisite décor is the key to Zhongshuge's success, but it also makes it seem less pure. In the store, you can clearly feel that the focus of the bookstore is on the environment, not the books themselves, and there are many tourists who go to the store to take photos and check in, which is a little noisy. And because the shelves are too high, many of the books placed on the top floor are out of reach for readers, and it seems that the cart is put before the horse.