Indie Bookstore Crawl 2026!

[silverflight8]

The indie bookstores here organized a book crawl this year again, and I completed it! Last year my friend and I only found about it late, so we blitzed about twenty stores in two days (don't recommend this). This year, fantasy book club organized Saturday bookstore crawls so it was spread across 4 weekends, which worked out really nicely. People dropped in and out as schedules permitted - I missed one because I was sick - but it was really great. Most of the bookstores we took transit or walked, with one day being carpooled driving to hit the more outlying/hard to get to ones. I ended up going to 25 bookstores in total.

The bookstore crawls made me realize there are a lot more indie bookstores than I realized! Despite the much bemoaned deaths of Borders, Barnes and Noble, etc, many of the indie bookstores are doing well. Some of them are quite general, but some were small and tightly focused on e.g. feminist lit, Italian culture and lit, the cat cafe was mostly cat-related books, several bookstores plus gaming stores had nerdy/D&D/games novels. My favourite of the focused bookstores is the romance bookstore, which is always absolutely hopping on weekends. It's got a coffeeshop inside - another great pairing, there's always people there chatting, some dates I think too - and it's well laid out with romance subgenres on different shelves instead of all crammed together. I'm also impressed a fair amount of men are there, browsing. Woohoo! Romance keeps publishing going and is a lot of fun and joy.

I mostly kept a lid on it and didn't buy 1,492,765 trinkets and books, but it was tough. I did end up buying a locket necklace shaped like a book. Now I just have to think of something to put in the two frames...maybe if I paint something tiny...

Since I got all the stamps and then went back to some of the stores on Apr 25, Indie Bookstore Day, I got a lot of random prizes too. Lots of stickers - I love a sticker - a tote bag, an ARC, etc. Honestly I don't care that much about prizes but I LOVE to fill out all the stamps in a passport. This is why I try to be careful what challenges I embark on. But it was great to meet up with people in book club, and I also finally convinced the book club leader to start having in-person meetings again. We went Zoom during COVID and I've really missed being able to interact with book club people in person. Not to mention the issues with Zoom and monologuing, which is tough. So I am excited about the next meetings!

Comments

[sherrilina]

Yay! We had a bookstore crawl in my city too, but just on the one day, and since I was toting my toddler with me on public transit, I was not overly ambitious haha. I semi cheated and got one stop in during the work week at a Chinese bookstore near my office (it actually got shut down in Shanghai and relocated here!), since the guy didnt care and already had the passports out (I had bought a book), but then I went to three bookstores in this block in one neighborhood a short bus ride from me, and then after lunch we hit up a comic store and my local indie bookstore walkable from our home...you juat needed 6 stamps to get the fabulous tote bag prize, which I managed to get the last one of at my local bookstore! It was fun to see all the different niche places...one was a Russian/Polish/Ukranian bookstore, one was a French bookstore, one had old books and a section of Catalan stuff because of the owners' heritage, and as I mentioned, there was the Chinese bookstore.

In addition to the grand prize, I also got a pigeon pin (the mascot of the crawl for some reason), free bookmarks, treats, coupons, and 2 free ARC books. Such a fun day! I think next year I will leave my toddler behind so I can venture out more extensively, haha.

[silverflight8]

That sounds like a lot of bookstores for one day especially with a toddler! Yeah it was cool to have both the more general bookstores and the ones specializing in different subjects.

Omg I love that a pigeon was the mascot!