When I was nine years old, I got my first paid writing job, reviewing for the Kid’s Newsletter—motto: “By Kids, for Kids”—published by the Corner Bookstore. The corner to which the store’s name referred was 93rd and Madison, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, two blocks from the house where I grew up. The neighborhood is crowded with schools, and the Corner Bookstore was a favorite spot for bookish children, who were the audience for their newsletter. The store paid ten dollars for each contribution, plus a review copy of the book under consideration—which remains a major perk of the trade. In my case, at least, it was money well spent, since I invariably handed it immediately back to store, before leaving with another book. I already loved reading when I started reviewing for the Corner Bookstore, but I don’t think it had occurred to me before then that I might build a life around this love. Those advance reading copies, complete with press releases and typos, taught me that books were not objects that miraculously sprung into the world but things that people made. And those crisp ten dollar bills taught me that making such things could be a way of making a (modest) living. All of which is to say that I owe a lot to this store.

It may surprise some people to hear that such practices took place in pre-Giuliani 1980s New York, which has since been mythologized as a hell on earth, but the Corner Bookstore was hardly unique among the shops in my neighborhood for having an intimate relationship with its customers. The owners of the video store on Lexington knew their customers well enough to call about an overdue movie we wanted, and we could wait there for the culprit to run it down the block. The deli men at the Madison Avenue Grocer knew my twin brother and me by sight, and if we picked up a sandwich after school, my mother could pay for it on her way home from work. More intimately still, the guys at the 90th Street Pharmacy knew before my mother walked in that a dreaded bout of head lice had struck our class.

Then the neighborhood changed. Blockbuster moved in, and the video store on Lexington shut down. After the Madison Avenue Grocer closed, the deli counter at the Food Emporium wasn’t interested in selling ham-and-swiss on credit to twelve year olds. The pharmacy made a valiant effort in the face of the arrival of Duane Reade across the street, but it succumbed eventually, too. When Barnes and Noble appeared on 86th and Lexington, it seemed likely that the Corner Bookstore would be next. But here’s where the story takes a surprising turn: a few years ago, when I fulfilled a dream that began on that corner by publishing my first book, I read from it at the Corner Bookstore. This week, as my second book is published, I’ll be reading there again. Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble is gone from 86th and Lexington, part of the chain’s contraction in the face of Amazon.

This should be surprising, but it isn’t. Barnes and Noble got a leg up on independent booksellers with a simple pitch: the largest possible selection at the cheapest possible price. If that’s what you’re after these days, there is no reason not to shop at Amazon. I know this because sometimes that’s exactly what I’m looking for, and when it is that’s where I shop. I say this without apology, since I don’t share the general Amazon-as-scourge attitude prevalent in publishing, in part because I recognized how many of the people with this attitude work for subsidiaries of enormous media corporations like CBS and NewsCorp, and in part because I remember when the fragile Barnes and Noble and the late, lamented Borders were publishing’s scourges du jour.

But the rise of online bookselling and the decline of the chain stores, has had a clarifying effect, making it clear that if you want anything more than just the best selection at the best price—if you want the kind of thing exemplified by the Kid’s Newsletter—you have to go to a small independent. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that New York City, at least, is the midst of a golden age of independent booksellers. In the past decade, McNally Jackson opened on Prince Street in Noho. Greenlight Books opened just a few years ago in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. In Cobble Hill, Bookcourt recently expanded. All of these stores play a role in their neighborhood that Amazon couldn’t possibly. Meanwhile, the Corner Bookstore still thrives, and it still publishes the Kid’s Newsletter.

Christopher R. Beha is an associate editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of a memoir, The Whole Five Feet. He contributes frequently to the New York Times Book Review. What Happened to Sophie Wilder is his first novel.

For all our wanderlusting, the most hallowed of our literary stopovers has long been The Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, an oasis of books at the halfway point between my childhood home and my grandparents’ house outside St. Louis (and Pudd’nhead Booksellers in Webster Grove). Sometime when I was in high school, a roadtripping rule was enacted allowing each member of our expedition to pick one side trip per cross-country venture.  Although the roadside attractions between Boulder and St. Louis are formidable and diverse—the world’s largest prairie dog! the Greyhound Hall of Fame! a huge fossil of a fish eating another fish!—The Raven remains the one stop we have to make, and that we’ve been making loyally now for 25 years.

The Raven is a mere two rooms big, but stocked with precisely the books you’d most want to read, often presciently flagged with handwritten recommendations from store employees. The bookstore’s specialty lies in mystery books, including a large selection of imported British mysteries, but every section is curated with love and depth and attention to detail. Its poetry books, its volumes on nature and science, its excellent slice of humor writing and the work of Edward Gorey (present, too, in the Gorey posters on the walls) all testify to the sensibility of a staff with whom I think I’d very much like to split a sandwich. I only pass through The Raven two or three times a year at best, and yet so many of my favorite books have come from its shelves. The shop is bright and tidy and pleasantly full, the way I want to imagine the space of a whaling ship would be, with every shelf and corner thoughtfully appointed for maximum usefulness on the long trip to come. And there’s always at least one bookstore cat who comes over to say hello and charm you with a leg rub, even if you’re as allergic as I am.

When a chain bookstore not to be named opened down the street from The Raven in 1997, I was afraid that our particular bookstore-roadtripping way of life was coming to an end. I needn’t have worried.  The Raven has outlasted not just that particular store, but the entire franchise—a testament to the scrappiness of indie bookshops, but even more to the magic of this particular one. The Raven remains one of the best bookstores I’ve encountered in my zigs and zags across America, a destination in and unto itself.

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky is an editorial assistant at Tin House. She holds an MFA from The New School and was a finalist for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers.

I never understood the popularity of the chains. Sure, a building full of books is a building full of books–its contents naturally confer sublimeness. But the chains were all the same: they had the same neutral flooring, the same polished woodgrain, the same computer-generated signage with the same bland fonts. And then there was the national chain bookstore smell: like a hotel lobby during continental breakfast service.

The bookstores I frequented on Capital Hill, in the University District, Ballard, and downtown, were grungy, just like the popular music of the era. They usually had a cart of cheap used books out front, a store cat or six, and shelf labels made of masking tape.

My favorite, just a block from my high school, was Red & Black Books, an old-school anarchist collective where I bought my “Keep Your Laws Off My Body” button and “Act Up” stickers, and picked up copies of the free weeklies and The Rocket. It closed in 1999, just months before the WTO protests that shut down the city and briefly radicalized Seattle’s otherwise blithely progressive population.

When I travel, the itinerary usually contains a stop at the local grocery co-op, a thrift shop, and at least one bookstore. It’s so easy to fall in love with a city by way of its indie bookshops. Sometimes it’s an unassuming shop in a tiny strip mall, like Eugene’s Black Sun Books, or a hidden affair up a side staircase, over the worker’s collective cafe, like Montpelier’s Black Sheep Books. Other times, it’s a classy corner in an upscale shopping district, like Richmond’s Black Swan Books, or the two-story nook of book stacks that is Bellingham’s Eclipse Books.

Most recently, I fell for Olympia’s (WA) Last Word Books , a store that so resembled the bookstores of my youth that I knew I would have to make regular stops en route between Portland and Seattle.

Last Word’s selection covers all genres and subjects. I headed straight for Literature, of course, where contemporary popular titles are side by side with small press offerings and paperback classics. (Recent finds: 1950’s Vintage paperbacks of Howards End, and Stories by Elizabeth Bowen, with classy Alfred Zalon covers; and Sweet Days of Discipline, by Fleur Jaeggy, with the Joseph Brodsky endorsement, “Reading time is approximately four hours.”).

Art adorns the walls above the 10-foot bookshelves, and there are creaky ladders on rolling tracks here and there. Science Fiction and Fantasy have their own cases, next to drama and poetry. An eclectic–if disheveled–children’s section contains collectibles (for me) and cheap reading copies (for my nose-picking three-year-old). The collection of pulp paperbacks in the second room (which houses the press and zine library), is easy to miss, but worth seeking out for finds like an original copy of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt , which was too dear for me at $25, but still tempting.

As for the atmosphere, there’s the jangle of the street outside and the long, shady aisles to browse. The place is not without a musty corner or two; one is outfitted with a not-quite-life-sized cut-out of John Wayne. The staff are as friendly as I can stand–helpful if asked, but otherwise perfectly disinterested in me–and frequently voluble with each other and their regulars on matters social and political. I’ve never met a more aloof store cat anywhere. The small black feline sauntered right past my out-stretched hand without a sniff or a rub. Twice. I was duly charmed.  Much as I was by the advertisement for Drunken Poetry: a monthly event in which a “designated drunk” reads poetry submissions from the audience.

As a writer and former bookseller, I don’t care so much where you buy your books so long as you replenish that stack on your bedside table every now and then (so long as you have a stack on your beside, I should say). If a Barnes & Noble is your option, have at it. The survival of books and bookstores is coming to depend more on people reading for reading’s sake and shopping in person for the sake of local economies.

For myself, I will never shop the chains; I prefer a less sanitary experience. I would rather leave a bookstore with a light film on my fingers from handling the merchandise. 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.

Alexis M. Smith grew up in Soldotna, Alaska, and Seattle, Washington. She received an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. She has written for Tarpaulin Sky and powells.com. Her first novel, Glaciers, a Tin House Books New Voice, was published in January. She has a son and two cats, and they all live together in a little apartment in Portland, Oregon.

“Don’t take my word for it,” I insisted. “Just ask Ann Patchett!” Patchett, who wrote about her love affair with Petoskey in The New York Times, wasn’t excited about her first trip to town. But the moment she arrived at McLean and Eakin, she said, “All the other bookstores I’ve known in my life fell away.”

Patchett discovered what I have known since I was a little girl: this bookstore is a true gem. Every summer, my family traveled from our Detroit suburb “Up North,” as we call northern Michigan. We’d visit the store before a day of boating on crystalline Walloon Lake, where Hemingway spent his childhood summers. McLean and Eakin was always meant to be a quick stop, but I found it difficult to leave the spectacular children’s section on the first floor and the cozy lower level, where I could browse for hours. But what I remember most was the staff.

“We’re all passionate readers,” owner Matt Norcross told me when I spoke to him over the phone last week. “If you don’t read, you won’t last long here.” This is obvious to anyone who has spent time in the store. No matter who sits behind the register, you can count on excellent recommendations—in any genre. This small fleet of booklovers was, for many years, led by Matt’s mother, Julie, who opened the store in 1992 and who, Patchett speculated, “must have a long history of people falling in love with her at first sight.” While I haven’t had the pleasure of knowing Julie personally, I, like many long-time customers, was always aware of her fairy godmotherly presence.

Although Julie’s career as a bookseller didn’t begin until her children were nearly grown, she seemed born for the role. By contrast, Matt, who’d struggled with reading as a kid, said he took a “nontraditional route.” He moved home from Chicago in 2003 and planned to work at the store temporarily while applying to graduate school. But he got hooked, which probably had something to do with his meeting—and later, marrying—Jessilynn, another McLean and Eakin staffer. Together, they are now at the store’s helm.

I haven’t been back in a few years, but I will always adore this store because it was one of the places where my love of books was ignited; I picked up my first Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, after a staff member led me to the regional authors section. I often imagine returning with a couple New York friends and watching them fall in love with this readers’ haven as I have. They’ll wonder what took them so long to make the trip.

Kate Schmier is an MFA student at Sarah Lawrence College. She hails from Birmingham, Michigan and now lives in New York City. She is the recent recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant for emerging writers.

Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought.

And above that: Vague as fog and looked for like mail / Farther off than Australia…

Hemingway. Plath. The world came into focus.

The cat was Sylvie. And this was Atlantis Books, on Santorini, a Greek island twelve lurching ferry-hours from Athens. A bookstore where, like Paris’ Shakespeare & Company, the employees live and sleep among the books. Had I planned my vacation around visiting a bookstore? Hell yes. Did I mention it’s in a cave on a cliff in Greece?

By the time I arrived, after the ferry and a couple local buses, I felt like a kid who’d been playing Zelda and stumbled onto a remote area of the map. Surely there was a treasure hidden here. My heart containers would be filled, I’d find the master sword in an old trunk. Or maybe the cat flopped across the front desk was my one true love reincarnated and all I had to do was scratch its ears the right way and then we’d be frolicking in the black sand beach down the road….

Instead of the master sword I found Chris, one of the founders, a guy so low-key you think at first he doesn’t like you. “If the hostel’s shit, you can crash here,” he offered. He gestured to the next room of the book-cave, visible through an indoor window. Under the hand-painted “Italian” sign and opposite the Philosophy Tower was a couchish spot hemmed in by books.

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.

Atlantis Books opened in 2004. It’s an inspiring place for many reasons—the location, the view, the books and what they contain. But taken alone, none of these is enough. A good bookstore is made of people. It is ambition and passion embodied. So as my hours in Atlantis passed, the question rang louder in my mind: how the hell did they do this? The answer, of course: by going all-in. In 2004, the founders—some American, some European—invested their personal savings and borrowed money from family and friends to rent and build the place. (You can read the story of how Atlantis came to be in detail here.) And when taxes went up—again—in 2010 and tourism tanked due to the European economic crisis, they launched an IndieGoGo campaign that raised over forty grand. Atlantis has also launched a unique press, Paravion, that issues enchanting postcard-sized mini-books of classic stories. The idea is to read it, write a note inside, and mail it on.

And this year they threw a literary festival so successful they’re making it annual. Another idea thrown around while I was there was a Shakespeare sock puppet theater on the roof terrace.

So often, places retain the energy and spirit in which they were built. Turning a cave-house into a bookshop, in a foreign country, with limited resources, must have been crazy stressful; there must have been arguments over design and cash and personal stuff; there must have been, and still be, an immense pressure to survive after all that’s been invested. But the vibe inside Atlantis Books is mellow, welcoming, somehow trusting. It’s charming and cozy but not in a, say, McSweeney’s Pirate Store kind of way. It’s less calculated than that, more eccentric. The employees are travelers themselves who come and run the till for a few months before moving on; they don’t seem to feel much more like insiders than anyone else who wanders in. Spiraling around the domed ceiling are the names of everyone who’s worked there. And there’s plenty of room for more.

The place is stuffed with books, but don’t show up with your heart set on a particular title. I asked for The Magus but all their copies had sold. Like, months ago. Their first shipment of books came from an eBay mystery lot. Displayed in a place of honor over a door frame is a book from that initial batch, How To Mount Fish Trophies. (I wonder if a copy of this wonder has ever passed through.) Since then, used books have come from a book buyer in Oxford; new ones come straight from the publisher.

And this is fine. This is maybe preferable. People don’t come to shops like Atlantis because they carry a particular book. People go for the adventure; they go precisely because The Magus is long out of stock and the owners don’t care if it comes back. Because in its place you might find Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, or Sara Waters in French or a philosophy book you would’ve ignored on the shelves back in Indianapolis but somehow strikes you just right as you travel through Greece.

The night I spent there, locals and tourists wandered in and out while Chris plucked grooves on a cello he cradled like a guitar, his bare toes tapping the wood floor. Occasionally he’d get up and offer browsers some wine from a plastic half-liter bottle. Warm light filled the space, bouncing off the high curves of the ceiling. I had that childhood feeling again and thought, This is what it’d be like if Fraggle Rock had an independent bookseller. In the bunk above me, a German girl who’d been working there a couple months watched the Cosby Show on her laptop, laughing loudly as she listened through headphones.

This was last September, around the time scientists at CERN claimed they’d found evidence of particles traveling faster than the speed of light. Neutrinos. “What’s the hell’s a neutrino?” someone asked in response to the news. Another customer joined in: “So, e doesn’t equal mc squared anymore. Big deal. Einstein was wrong and time machines are totally possible. Sci-fi writers have known that for years.” A couple off-duty employees joined the conversation from their bunks hidden behind bookshelves. Stuff going faster than light—imagine the possibilities! Nevermind that CERN’s findings were questionable at best and remain unverified. Everyone wanted to believe in them because it gave us something to talk about with strangers—something we actually understood, like time travel.

A couple ladies from Boston came in, dressed in billowy blouses obviously purchased during their time in Greece. One of them asked Chris how they reached the books way up high, the ones pressing against the ceiling. “Oh, we have a ladder,” he told her. “But if you drink enough wine, you can hover.”

The women giggled. But I sort of believed him.

I fell asleep among the smell of paper and glue and wood. The wine had gone pleasantly to my head. I pretended I was a book, stacked among my peers.  In many ways we are like books, especially when we travel; we present a cover and contain the stories of our days. A book one person couldn’t stand gets left at the hostel and devoured by another. It felt right to be shelved. Like these books, I had a place here. As does everyone who loves books and stories, who believes that we were born lucky.

Kelly Luce’s story collection received the San Francisco Foundation’s 2008 Jackson Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Bakeless Prize. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, American Short Fiction, and other magazines. She keeps a hula hoop in her car.

Prior to that, I grew up in suburban Maryland and New England, where my literary education was weirdly sparse and uneven: my parents were immigrants whose first language was not English, so reading was not a part of our family life; my high school was so “progressive” that a required canon was jettisoned in favor of multi-culti electives and “individualized study”; and my college years were shamefully wasted (by me) on shallow skim-reading of Masterpieces of Western Civilization (Don Quixote, I hardly knew ye!). By the time I emerged into young adulthood, I blinked my eyes hard and wondered what the hell had happened; eight years of elite education, and I had not yet learned to read.

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.

At McNally Jackson, adorable and erudite Dustin – events coordinator extraordinaire – sat down for a half an hour one evening with my fiction students (we were discussing “publishing”) in a quiet corner of the store to wax passionate about the curatorial and community-building roles of independent booksellers. For a year, when I worked and volunteered at Housing Works (waist-deep in that unnerving time of unpublished novel-writing), I spent early mornings baking scones and quiches for the café while chatting about books with (then-store-opener, now Wall Street Journal fiction columnist) Sam Sacks. The staff at Book Culture – my current neighborhood joint – won me over with their dogs-welcome policy (along with the many biscuits they’ve offered my pup), not to mention their unfailing helpfulness when I’m looking for weird stuff (the Thomas Carlyle translation of Wilhelm Meister, anyone?).

Last but not least, at The Corner Bookstore, a darkly bearded young man once piled six or seven books (including stories by the amazing Francisco Coloane, previously unknown to me) into my arms, when I asked, “So what have you read lately that you love?” And 33-year owners Lenny and Ray launched my debut novel on an early spring evening in 2010 with wine, fruit and cheese, and a benediction I will never forget: Your future as a writer is clear to us, may it unfold as beautifully as your novel.

On the other hand, the bookstore that comes to mind when I think of “most influential on my literary education” is a strip-mall chain store in Seattle’s university district called Half Price Books. On its face, it was an unremarkable place, a convenient cheap-used-books spot for the general book browser. It didn’t hold readings, was nothing like a “literary center”; in fact its fiction section (back in the late 90s, that is) was neither extensive nor particularly literary. It was a good place to look for, say, used cookbooks or Yoga for Dummies or James Patterson hard covers, or to sell off your own stock of unwanteds for spare change.

I needed that spare change back then. I was in graduate school, wondering how I’d managed to get accepted to an MFA program, when I’d written so little and read even less. I was there because I had a vague feeling that I was a late-blooming artist of some kind, and because the kindly chair of the program thought I had a “good ear for language.” All this to say that I had a lot of catching up to do, literarily speaking, and little money with which to do it.

Half Price Books was the perfect candy man for this remedial book fiend. They had an abundant clearance section with books in shitty condition and editions with the ugliest covers.  It was a students’ dumping ground that became my gold mine. And I never had to worry about running in to classmates or professors (they were all at Elliott Bay Book Co.) and having to explain why I was buying a stack of 15 books for $12 that most people had read in high school or for undergraduate lectures. Half Price Books kept me in mass market paperbacks of Faulkner and Hemingway, George Eliot and Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Twain, Steinbeck, the Brontes, Dickens, Zora Neale Hurston, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, James Baldwin, Emerson, Henry James, Toni Morrison, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I hope my parents, who labored to support my institutional education, aren’t reading this: for pennies on the dollar, at Half Price Books, my true life of learning began.

Sonya Chung is the author of the novel Long for This World. Her stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in the publications Threepenny Review, Sonora Review, FiveChapters, and BOMB magazine, among others. Her essay on meeting James Salter can be found in the current issue of Tin House.

In this light, I present to you the English-language bookstore, Tea & Tattered Pages. It is probably nowhere near where you are going,  it might not have the book you are looking for, and if you are claustrophobic, allergic to cats, or have particularly rambunctious children in tow, this isn’t the place for you. Yet despite not being a top-tier destination, or the “best” English-language bookstore in Paris, it affords a shabby-charm that lingers, evoking a nostalgia for a time when most bookstores took on the character of their owners.

You might find this owner, a diminutive woman with high-waisted jeans, a formidable necklace atop a tucked-in turtleneck sweater, and a sonorous, gravelly voice, taking a drag from her cigarette at her computer, when you enter the tiny main room. The aisles are so narrow you could probably flare your arms and elbow both Auel and Zizek from opposite shelves. Despite the size of the place, every conceivable space is utilized. Books are everywhere in various states of wear, shoe-horned into shelves, amassed in piles by your feet, piled in plastic crates, mounded by the spiral staircase that leads to the store’s second room of books in the basement.

With a preponderance of used, mass-market fiction you probably won’t find that book by Aimee Bender or Steve Millhauser you were looking for.  But, oddly, the individual books were less the point for me. It was the comfort of being surrounded by books en masse, as if being held by them in that tiny space, that compelled. When we visited we were the only ones there. Classical music wafted atop the dusty air as we made our way to the little tea room in back. Even here the place is stuffed with books. And from here you can while away the hours with the book of your choice, some English tea, a piece of fruit cake, and Ming Luong, the resident orange cat, who we found stretched out asleep on one of the chairs, half-hidden by the table cloth.

Tea and Tattered Pages is not a store you will come upon by chance but you can make a great literary day of it. I’d recommend starting at the Montparnasse cemetery,  a far less-visited cemetery than Père Lachaise, but a place I return to every time I’m in Paris. It contains the graves of many of the great French writers—Baudelaire,  Maupassant,  Beauvoir and Sartre to name a few—and other étrangers just as formidable, from Beckett and Sontag to Ionesco and Julio Cortázar. After paying homage to your favorites (and hopefully a brief hello at Serge Gainsbourg’s resting place) have lunch at the nearby Crêperie de Josselin. Order the fixed-menu: a pitcher of hard apple cider, a savory buckwheat crepe filled with egg, cheese and ham, and a dessert crepe of chestnut caramel, and then walk it all off as you make the fifteen minute journey toward the calm, out-of-time atmosphere of Tea & Tattered Pages.

David Naimon is a writer, physician, and radio host of the literary program Between the Covers in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in The Missouri Review, StoryQuarterly, and ZYZZYVA, among others, and he was a 2009 fellow at the Tin House Writers Workshop. He is currently working on a co-authored novel that takes place in the arctic of the future with Ben Parzybok.

What’s my favorite bookstore in Nashville? That’s easy. It’s Parnassus, which bestselling novelist Ann Patchett and former Random House sales rep, Karen Hayes, opened just under two weeks ago in Green Hill’s Greenbrier Village shopping center, although my answer reminds me of a joke I saw Peter Sellers make about the USSR on The Today Show in the late seventies. “Not only are Troika cigarettes my favorite brand in Russia,” he said, holding up an imaginary pack, “they are also the only brand in Russia.” Parnassus is the only independent bookstore Nashville’s got right now. That it already happens to be great means we’re very lucky.

On balance, 2011 was a nearly apocalyptic year for Nashville booklovers, one which injected unfortunate irony into its namesake as The Athens of the South. In January our fair city witnessed the shuttering of Davis Kidd, a 30-year-old institution which had passed from the locally-owned hands of Karen Davis and Thelma Kidd to Neil Van Uum’s consortium Joseph-Beth Booksellers, the latter ultimately closing the Nashville store because (and I quote Van Uum from the Nashville Scene article I wrote about its demise), ”The Nashville store was profitable but it had a million six in inventory plus a huge rent number, and when you put it all together you didn’t have the level of profitability you needed to fund it.” That’s corporate speak for “not profitable enough,” detonation’s thump and flash that precedes the blast wave, restructuring’s nuclear bomb. Suddenly, Nashville was a city without an independent bookstore.

To make matters even bleaker, the Davidson County Borders shuttered as well, leaving only Books-A-Million and Hillsboro Village’s used bookstore Bookman/Bookwoman to fill the void. For the literary community, it was the nightmare scenario. Nashville was now off the map for touring writers. For booklovers, it was the end of choice itself. Want to buy Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah or James Salter’s Light Years? You could point and click on Amazon, download it on your e-reader if you go in for that sort of thing, or order it through the Cool Springs Barnes & Noble and drive twenty miles to pick it up once it had arrived. Never leave your home or enlarge your carbon footprint to buy a book: a pair of insidious options and, when you think about it, a possible future everywhere. If, however, you wanted to kill some time and let what you wanted find you, well, you couldn’t. End of story.

Enter Patchett and Hayes. The former not only has deep pockets (she fronted the $300,000 in startup costs) but has also spent her life in great independent bookstores all over the country and knows, first hand, the vital impact they have on an author’s livelihood as well as their local literary community. Hayes, meanwhile, is an industry-insider who simply can’t envision a world without books—and by that she means tree books. Hayes was considering a career shift by necessity (Random House offered her early retirement and she feared for her job security if she didn’t take it); Patchett, a native Nashvillian, couldn’t imagine living in a city without bookstore. The rest is history, albeit one of the most well-documented bookstore openings ever, with articles in The Christian Science Monitor, Time, The New York Times, Garden & Gun, and Publisher’s Weekly, to name only a few, the list’s length attributable to Patchett’s star-power and high-stock value gone through the roof since State of Wonder‘s release, a bestseller that’s found its way to the top of so many end-of-year Best Of lists.

Of course, there’s another reason for the attention: Parnassus arrives at a time of widely chronicled economic and industry-wide flux. What is the fate of books? Of brick-and-mortar bookstores? Of print itself? Is Amazon the publishing industry’s equivalent of the Death Star and CEO Jeff Bezos Darth Vadar? Are we doomed to read everything on screens? Is Parnassus the canary in the coalmine or a sign of scalable things to come, another player in the locavore/Occupy Wall Street movement, the Fellowship of the Ring (a book!) allied against the armies of Mordor (Corporate America), the seedling emerging from ash after the earth’s been scorched by the firestorms of the Big Box retail wars and The Great Recession. Is ascribing such significance onto a 2,500-square-foot operation too much for it to bear? We shall see.

As for the speed with which the whole operation was up and running, it’s undeniable money can move mountains, but Hayes was also generously aided by Rebecca Fitting, co-owner of New York’s Greenlight Bookstore, who spared Hayes months of research and legwork by supplying her with business plans and templates, data for various sections as well as startup figures that made Parnassus’s arrival seem Abracadabra-fast. That’s a good thing, because the store opened in time for the holiday season, had its stock happily decimated by grateful patrons opening weekend, and immediately signed on over 150 people to its Founder Rewards program. Its web site and e-book hub isn’t quite up and running yet, though soon e-readers will be able to buy digital texts through Google via www.parnassus.net. And there are corporate and school partnerships as yet to be formed and direct mailings to customers via Ingram and other as yet unanticipated revenue streams to tap, but no matter. Hayes and Patchett are thrilled: Parnassus has already far exceeded initial sales projections. More satisfyingly, the city’s goodwill has floored both.

The store itself is lovely—a long, rectangular space, high-ceilinged, with exposed support beams and ventilation ducts painted robin’s-egg blue. Small spotlights illuminate the shelves, which are still being restocked since the opening by none other than Karen Davis, Davis-Kidd’s founder, who’s been consulting for the store and appears relieved and happy to be back in retail. The blond hardwoods give the space a mellow, modern feel. As you enter on the left, there’s a bulletin board with an adjacent blackboard detailing events (blank right now since nothing’s scheduled in the near term). There’s a case for staff picks, another for bestsellers and recent National Book Award winners. The fiction shelves run most of the wall’s length and are beautifully curated, reveal only pros at work here, because the experience of browsing them is to be reminded not only of all you have yet to read but never knew you wanted to. There’s a gorgeous upright piano in the far corner which sounds knockout thanks to the joint’s acoustics; above it, a series of Jack Spencer photographs populated with rust-toned, haunted structures and dreamscape figures, all of them on consignment from Cumberland Gallery, one of the Parnassus’s local partnerships, though these sidelines are decorative and, thankfully, minimal—enhancements only. The music/coffee table section at the back is arrayed jacket first (Def Jam Recordings, Elliott Erwitt’s Sequentially Yours, Texas Trobadours) and is arrayed like a set of album covers; it’s curated by Matt Slocum, a part-time employee more famous as a member of the band Sixpence None the Richer. It shares a wall with Parnassus Junior, the children’s section behind it, the area lit by star-shaped fixtures with a child-size entrance framed by a pediment and columns. (For Nashville’s children, all Greek temples are versions of the Parthenon.) New leather chairs just came in and almost all are taken by patrons throughout. At the register, a bookseller is recommending The Family Fang by Sewanee professor Kevin Wilson, the book a double cause célèbre, since Nicole Kidman just optioned the film rights. The quiet, in other words, is interrupted by people talking about books, which is no interruption at all.

And so the annus mirabilis for a major American city’s literary community comes to close with a silver lining, a new beginning—pick your corny, uplifting conclusion to this chapter, though the story is far from ended. Let the triumphal music swell, for now. Hear our city’s sigh of relief. In the meantime, we’ll keep one eye on the “free” market (though recent news of the Fed’s multi-trillion dollar injection to the banks in 2008 gives the lie to that adjective) and the other on the future. And for those reading this in other cities, remember, what happened in Nashville can happen where you live. 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. They are the problem, not the solution, their data is anecdote, and their goal is to sell you not what you need but what they want to you to buy. We Nashvillians lived in a city of free content and point-and-click convenience for a year and it wasn’t pretty. You—we all—have a choice in these matters, but it comes with a cost.

Adam Ross lives in Nashville with his wife and two daughters. His debut novel, Mr. Peanut, a 2010 New York Times Notable Book, was also named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New Republic, and The Economist. Ladies and Gentlemen, his short story collection, was included in Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2011.

As both a writer and reader, I’m a huge fan of independent bookshops. Word of mouth is a necessity for smaller-press authors like me without big publicity budgets behind us, and hand-selling and table displays by enthusiastic indie bookstore staff play a vital part in bringing attention to books that might otherwise get overlooked. And when I’m in the market for a new read, I love getting booksellers’ suggestions on what to pick up.

This past July, I attended the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop in Portland, Oregon (with Joy Williams, who is amazing and makes my brain explode), and high up on my to-do list was, of course, a Powell’s pilgrimage. I made the trek to the beauteous bookselling behemoth with my new workshop friend Rose, and once inside, we were immediately overwhelmed. We grabbed a map—a map! To navigate a bookstore!—and wandered in a blissful, texty trance around the seemingly endless colour-coded rooms. I was thrilled to note that not only was Powell’s full of books, it was also full of shoppers. I even had to wait in line to make my purchase!

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. Although we’ve sadly lost some wonderful shops over the last few years, we still have many that are not only doing well, but thriving. While the unwieldy big-box stores desperately stock up on more scented candles and yoga mats, the nimble independents embrace and interact with their communities, and offer a friendlier and more personal experience.

Three of my favourites (all selling new books) are Another Story Bookshop, Ben McNally Books, and Type Books. All feature a wide selection of carefully curated volumes, and happily host book launches and public-outreach events. Staff are avid readers and passionate cheerleaders for their local authors.

Another Story Bookshop is an enchanting, warmly welcoming spot in the west-end Roncesvalles Village. Tables and shelves overflow with colourful covers and spines, and the staff’s giddy excitement over their latest finds is inspiring and contagious.

Ben McNally Books, located downtown, offers the excellent combination of gracious and knowledgeable staff and a calming, Zen-like atmosphere, plus sprawling table displays and cozy nooks framed by tall, inviting shelves.

Type Books, with one location in the west end and the other in the midtown Forest Hill neighbourhood, recently celebrated its fifth birthday. Staff picks are exuberantly displayed, as is a unique “Plotless Fiction” section.

This photo shows the West Queen West location—a long, narrow store built for browsing, with part-fancy-part-playful décor that makes it feel a little mischievous.

I spoke with the owners of these three shops and asked them what they love most about their business.

Another Story’s page-loving proprietor Sheila Koffman told me:

My favourite part of owning and running an independent bookstore is finding interesting and exciting new books to share with our community of readers. These are sometimes seldom-told stories from different parts of the world or even stories and books neglected by the mainstream that are nonetheless very important. I love the opportunity to engage with fabulous staff, authors, and members of the community about books and issues that matter.

Ben McNally and his son Rupert discussed the joys of running their beautiful store:

Photo by Erin Balser

Rupert: It has often been remarked how fortunate I am to work in a family business. But, when people are kind enough to remind me of this fact, I feel they might be missing the entire truth of their words. My family has grown exponentially because of Ben McNally Books, and has done so always for the better. Those few coworkers who do not share the family name on the sign above our door are no less a part of the family, and many of our patrons, too, have become similarly endeared. As fortunate as I am to be a part of this eventuality, it still does not quite match what I consider to be the most amazing aspect of my employment: I have watched, over these last four years, the realization of my father’s dream. It’s an influential and powerful observance for a son, and perhaps it is only fitting that this realization comes in the form of a bookstore: for, is not each book its own manifestation of a dream?

Ben: I’d have to say that there is never any shortage of weird and wonderful things going on at our place. The barrier between customer and bookseller is quite often non-existent: the flow of knowledge and enthusiasm goes both ways.

Type is owned by Joanne Saul and Samara Walbohm, with Samara replying:

My favourite part of running an indie bookstore is serving the needs of our community—a community that also supports us! We feel we offer something different, unique, and exciting every time someone comes into the store, whether they’re a regular or are coming into the store for the first time. We started Type to create an intellectual hub, a community that we felt was lacking at that time (almost six years ago). We made the move from academia to share our interests in literature with a like-minded community—to create and then support this community, one filled with writers, artists, and readers!

Two more great Toronto indies are Book City and Nicholas Hoare. Book City is a bright, friendly store with five locations around Toronto—and it just marked its 35th anniversary! Nicholas Hoare is a lovely wood-and-brick shop with beckoning shelves and tables that encourage plenty of meandering. In addition to its downtown Toronto location, there are also stores in Ottawa in Montreal.

Finally, for those literary travellers wishing to venture farther afield, here are some indie gems outside Toronto. This is by no means a complete list of all independent bookstores in Ontario, and certainly not Canada—I’ve missed the majority of our provinces here—I’m just singling out a few that are close to my heart.

The Bookshelf in Guelph, Ontario. Featuring enticing displays of gleeful staff recommendations, plus a bar, restaurant, and movie theatre.

Octopus Books in Ottawa, Ontario. I wrote a blog post about this eight-legged delight in Canada’s capital for Canadian Bookshelf.

Blue Heron Books in Uxbridge, Ontario. A comfy and cheery home-away-from-home for fiction (and non-fiction, and poetry, etc.) aficionados.

Pages on Kensington and Shelf Life Books in Calgary, Alberta. Okay, so these two tome-selling treasures are on the other side of the country, but they’re worth the trip!

Jessica Westhead is a Toronto writer and editor, and one of the short-story-loving masterminds behind YOSS. Her fiction has appeared in major literary journals in Canada and the U.S., including Geist, The New Quarterly, and Indiana Review. Her novel Pulpy and Midge was published in 2007 by Coach House Books, and her short story collection And Also Sharks was published by Cormorant Books in spring 2011.  Her ardor for independent bookstores grows stronger by the day.

Beers Books-Sacramento, CA
Newtonville Books-Boston, MA
Boswell Book Company-Milwaukee, WI
TurnRow Book Company-Greenwood, MS
Green Apple Books-SF, CA
Borderland Books-SF,CA
Politics & Prose-Washington, D.C.
R.J. Julia-Madison, CT
The Spiral Bookcase-Philadelphia, PA
Boulder Bookstore-Boulder,CO
Dorian Books-Youngstown, OH
St. Marks Bookshop-East Village, NY
Kaboom Books-Houston, TX
Auntie’s Books-Spokane, WA
Taylor’s Books-Charleston, WV
Elk River Books-Livingston, MT