I have always been a reader. Ever since I was able to, you could find me with a book. The stories grew more complex over the years, the genres shifted, but the love never did. I was, at my core, a lover of books.
What I didn’t have growing up was the means to own them. Books were a luxury my family couldn’t afford, so I read whatever I could find, wherever I could find it, and I was grateful for every page.
Years later, when work took me across the country, I started wandering into bookstores the way some people wander into churches. Not looking for anything in particular. Just looking.
Then I decided to go from lifelong reader to bookseller, and I got a peek behind the curtain. My eyes were opened for the first time — not just to the books I had read and the ideas they had planted over the years, but to the importance of the infrastructure of reading itself.
Many book lovers never go beyond reading. Many will never stop to consider where their books are purchased, or how that choice impacts their communities. I know, because I was once in the same mindset. I thought reading was enough.
It isn’t.
In city after city, I walked into bookstores that wore their beliefs openly — not on a sign above the door, but on the shelves themselves. A women’s history section overflowing with voices I’d never encountered in school. A store dedicated entirely to Black excellence. Another built around Latine authors, their stories finally centered instead of shelved as an afterthought. Drag queen story times filling small rooms with laughter and color and kids who got to see themselves celebrated.
Nobody handed me a pamphlet. Nobody made a speech. The shelves were the statement.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I felt something I didn’t have a word for at first. It took me a while to name it.
Safe. I felt safe. Like there was nothing about me — nothing I believed, nothing I came from, nothing I loved — that would ever make me unwelcome here. Because within those four walls, in the collected pages of every book on every shelf, lived all the complicated, contradictory, breathtaking things that make us human. Every one of them treated as worthy of space.
Indie bookstores have always been chosen by people who understand something important. They understand that money staying in their communities will always be more beneficial than putting it in the hands of an organization whose sole purpose is to disrupt the entire world of literature and break it. They understand that indie bookshops have historically stocked banned books, championed LGBTQ+ voices before it was safe, and carried authors ignored by mainstream retail — not because it was profitable, but because someone had to. People who have chosen meaning over money, every single time.
They didn’t do it for recognition. They rarely get any. They did it because they believe in the reader — every reader — and they have never stopped.
As I sit here ahead of Independent Bookstore Day — April 25th this year — I’ll be honest with you. I find myself frustrated. No matter how much I post, no matter how many conversations I have, I can’t seem to reach enough people to get the message across. But that’s exactly what we need: more people who truly love books and want to keep this community intact.
So I’m asking you directly.
Walk into an indie bookstore this Saturday. Buy a book. Bring someone who’s never been. Let the shelves speak to them the way they once spoke to me. And then come back in June. And September. And January.
Because Independent Bookstore Day shouldn’t be a one and done shopping trip. See it as a vote for the kind of world you want to live in. These stores, and the people in them, have been quietly holding that world together for a long time. The least we can do is show up.
