Beyond Books
This Independent Bookshop Week (Saturday 18 June – Saturday 25 Jun), we’re celebrating some of our favourite indie bookshops. We often seek out bookstores when we’re feeling lost, even lonely, when we need a pick-me-up, when we need inspiration, and occasionally when we have that happy-just-to-be-in-the-world-feeling and want to connect with other people. Bookshops are pretty much there for us all the times of our lives.
So let’s return the favour this week and show up for them. Show them our support: Buy a book, attend an event, say hello to the booksellers and ask their advice on your next read, go on a bookshop crawl. Make a point of visiting your local bookshop, alone, with your friends, on a date, or with your kids (get them in the habit of bookstores early).
That way bookshops will get to stay around, making our lives and communities just that little bit better.
Here are our picks this week for Independent Bookshops we love and why we think they matter.
Bookbar, London
If we were a bookshop, we’d aspire to something like this: coffee on arrival, bottles of wine dotted amongst the bookshelves downstairs, spot-on curation from owner Chrissy Ryan (see the very covetable Booklists), and inspiring events that have included conversations with people like Emma Gannon and “read-dating”. To celebrate the book of the month: Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, Bookbar even played host to a pop-up nail bar. Where “books are social”, this is a place to seek out all the things: connecting, learning, or most crucial of all belonging
With a cause: This one’s all about community: even their Loyalty Card supports books for the local school, Ambler Primary.
To do: Get some bibliotherapy with Shelf Medicate Prescription and Consultation. We’ve very much in need of the escapism offered by the G&T for the Soul Prescription. Consultations are also available for the kids in our life.
Max Minerva’s, Bristol
Every neighborhood needs its own bookstore, every community a hub for kids and grown-ups. When Jessica Paul and Sam Taylor moved into Bristol’s Westbury Park neighborhood they thought they’d found that in Durham Down Bookshop. But when the owner died in 2016, they realized that it was down to them to keep a bookstore in their community. In 2018, Max Minerva’s opened its welcoming yellow fronted space, with a built-in window seat and cozy armchair for lingering. For Jessica, “Bookshops are a comfort thing.” They also tell deeply personal stories: Named after Maxene Emily Minerva, Paul’s late 15-year-old cousin (and also the Goddess of Knowledge Minerva), the store celebrates her voracious love of reading. It’s a joyful celebration of how books are all about ‘emotion, imagination, and ways to making you think.”
With a cause: Bright orange lettering outlines a quote from Lemony Snicket: “All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.” And it is the joy of reading for all, but particularly kids, that Max Minerva’s encourages by focusing on kids' literacy and creative classes that tell some of those secrets.
To do: Sign up for a children’s reading subscription, and choose between titles for Juniors aged 9 to 12 or aged 5 to 8.
The Book Hive, Norwich
Founded by Henry Layte who describes it as “someone’s home where you can buy a book. Always has, intentionally,’ The Book Hive is an irreverent indie bookstore, with a highly individualistic take on what to read. Located in a landmark building in Norwich Lanes, this is a bookstore for discovering the unexpected. Beloved by authors like Margaret Atwood (who completed her novel The Heart Goes Last in one of its upstairs rooms) and poet Simon Armitage (part of the shop’s award-winning imprint Propolis), the titles on offer are not your usual suspects, but an eclectic assortment that puts personal choice above algorithms. Similarly, the events push back on where we’re all falling down: like Page Against the Machine, a space dedicated to reading, which in itself feels radical now: coming together, detoxing from tech, and putting the world on hold by escaping into a good book.
With a cause: The Book Hive supports the work of the Norman Lamb Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund, which funds vital local, grassroots, community mental health initiatives
To do: Join the Short Short Story BookClub, which takes the much underrated short story and gives it its due with two collections mailed a month to be discussed for now on Zoom.
Support your small book store. Read something you love.
Let us know which local bookshops make your life better and which you’d recommend for our guide.
[Main photo: Photo by Pj Accetturo on Unsplash]
