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“Like the sand and salt on the skin after a day at the beach, the essence of the bookshop should linger on the body (and in the spirit) for hours, or even days, afterwards.”

“When my friends debated their favorite Manhattan bookstore, I, of course, began gushing about Petoskey, Michigan’s McLean and Eakin.”

“A good bookstore feels more like a home than a retail space. It’s a meeting place. It’s that one friend’s house where everyone went after school, where you felt comfortable enough to hang out even if Billy or Shannon or Hubert wasn’t there. In this sense, book lovers, writers and adventurers all have a home in the postcard-perfect town of Oia.”

The independent bookstores I love in New York are literary havens, the soul-nourishing equivalent of your grandmother’s Sunday-afternoon kitchen. What I mean is that a beloved bookstore is more than just a smart place, it’s a warm place. Over the years, I find that I’ve come to frequent independent bookstores primarily to boost my spirit; and when I walk out with a book or two that happens to blow my mind (which is more often than not the case), I count myself an extra-lucky girl.

“It was the comfort of being surrounded by books en masse, as if being held by them in that tiny space, that compelled.”

“If you care about books and bookstores, protect them with your wallet or pocketbook and thereby thumb your nose at the discount-only naysayers and end-of-print soothsayers.”

“My Powell’s visit got me thinking about the many incredible indie bookshops in Toronto, my hometown. I’m proud to live in a city that—like Portland—values and supports its independent bookstores.”

“Ditch the violent, salivating, demented shoppers….”

“Suddenly the land appears like an upside-down sky of stars.”

“At Taylor Books, the cheese does not stand alone.”

“We emerge into the day as if our souls were fired by sun.”

“A thunderdome of big ass literary retail.”

“Everybody in the world was getting a free handout on something except her family, she believed.”

From the depths of Book Purgatory, our good friend (and beleaguered Chelsea supporter) Andrew Brininstool reports on the oasis that is Houston’s Kaboom Books. There are no bookstores where I live. I don’t mean there are no good bookstores, or independent bookstores. I mean there are no bookstores (To be fair, our town does have [...]

When I first moved to New York in 1986, I had a vision of the Village as teaming with artists and poets, a brawling, burning place where you could get in fistfights over aesthetics. I moved here with $150 to my name, no connections of any kind, but with a vague dream of doing something [...]

After a month-long hiatus, The Open Bar is back on the road (don’t worry, we hitchhike), seeking fortune, fame, and our nation’s best independent booksellers. In this week’s installment, Christopher Barzak takes us down Interstate 680 for a visit to the pride of Youngstown, OH, Dorian Books.

With a six-pack from the Avery Brewery Company in the cooler, this week’s Book Clubbing takes a relaxing sojourn through the Rockies with our magazine’s new editorial assistant, Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, who offers us a personal look inside The Boulder Bookstore. In the four summers that I worked at the Boulder Bookstore, I had books recommended [...]

“Between the two halves of Borderlands, every stage of the book creation process is represented.”

I am not from Philadelphia, nor have I ever visited. But after seeing the movie Mannequin as a child, I started telling the kids in my class that my family hailed from there and that it was indeed true that the department store windows came to life at night.  These wild assertions got me beat [...]

“But just as a reading life changes and grows, so do the patterns of one’s bookstore browsing.”

“The bookstore made D.C. feel like a small town and our nation’s politics like local gossip.”

Green Apple is more like the immense private library you’ve always hoped to build in the enormous mansion you’ve always imagined owning.

“You are Alice in Wonderland in this bookshop.”

It’s the type of bookstore where the owner will delay heading home for the night so that he can take a visiting writer to go see Robert Johnson’s grave.