More than 1,200 booksellers in all 50 states participated in the 11th annual Independent Bookstore Day (IBD), held on April 27. As Heather Atkinson, a bookseller at Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis, put it, the celebration, held on the last Saturday of April each year, has become something of “an indie bookseller’s Christmas.”
Many stores partnered on organized crawls for book lovers, who received passports and stamps to mark their progress. Some booksellers in areas with large concentrations of stores—such as Chicagoland, which had 45 participating stores—went so far as to commission shuttle buses to more efficiently transport customers to different locations. (One bookseller reported that she took the opportunity to handsell a favorite read to customers during the bus ride.)
While most passport programs don't require a purchase for a stamp, the San Diego Book Crawl incentivized visitors to spend $10 in each participating store to earn stamps, which entitled them to prizes including totes, mugs, enamel pins, and stickers. Meanwhile, to get ahead of demand, the 28 Twin Cities booksellers participating in IBD started stamping passports a week before the actual day. Some of those bookstores ran out of passports by midday Saturday, including Comma, a Bookshop in Minneapolis, which resorted to stamping small blank cards.
Out west, Seattle also listed 28 bookstores on its passport, and gave store visitors 10 days to fill their cards. The western Washington region hosted a South Sound Book Crawl, coordinated by Invitation Book Shop in Gig Harbor, with 11 more participating stores to the south and west of Seattle. sweet pea Flaherty, owner of King's Books in Tacoma, described Saturday morning as "bonkers."
Special programming also encouraged customers to stop into participating stores. In St. Louis, Left Bank Books held a cocktail party for a trio of authors on IBD, with special libations inspired by each book, which drew a crowd. Also a draw for customers was Libro.fm's "Golden Ticket" giveaway, which entitled lucky shoppers who found a branded ticket hidden in a store's stacks to one free audiobook credit per month for a year.
Local reading groups began getting in on the action this year, too. In Tacoma, a silent book club caffeinated at a coffee shop on Saturday morning ahead of a book binge. Another club planned to get together the next day, April 28, to read and discuss their purchases at a wine bar and a coffeehouse across the street from A Good Book in Sumner, Wash. ("You have to pace yourself," a customer at A Good Book cautioned a zealous friend as they browsed the shelves.)
Sales were robust and booksellers ran low on popular titles including Salman Rushdie's Knife, Leigh Bardugo's The Familiar, Percival Everett's James, and Emily Henry's Funny Story. At Roundabout Books, in Bend, Ore., since 2016, owner Cassie Clemans called IBD "our second-best sales day ever." Clemans said IBD and December 23 tend to bring in Roundabout's strongest sales, and IBD lets her "pay for rent in one day. It makes all the difference, year after year." Zenith Bookstore in Duluth, Minn., called IBD the best sales day in the seven-year history of the store, and in Wichita, Kan., Watermark Books and Café reported that IBD surpassed Small Business Saturday. "IBD was definitely our best selling day since the holidays," said Watermark marketing and events manager Abel Velasquez. Clouds and rain in Wichita "perhaps prevented us from passing what we did last year, but it was still our best sell day of the year by a large margin."
An Independent Bookstore Spirit Week served as a warmup to the Saturday celebration, and festivities continued well into Sunday at many stores. After a frantic weekend of ringing up sales and stamping book-crawl passports, many booksellers may be wondering whether IBD should become Indie Bookstore Weekend.
This story has been updated with further information.
