📚 How Philly’s ‘bookstore crawl’ was born

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The Philadelphia Bookstore Crawl is back for its second year this Saturday, and it’s slated to be even bigger than last year.

The late-summer literary extravaganza encourages bibliophiles to hit up many of the Philly region’s indie bookstores for a day of special deals, book signings, giveaways, and more. Hey Philly chatted with Eric Smith — a local author, literary agent, and the organizer of the annual event — to learn more about the crawl, its origins, and what to expect.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Hey Philly: This is the second year for the Philly Bookstore Crawl. How did this event get started in the first place?

Smith: “A couple years ago, my wife and I moved away from Philadelphia. While we were away, we lived in Richmond, Virginia, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and both of those towns had a bookstore crawl. I kept telling my wife every time those bookstore crawls came around, ‘You know, if we ever move back to Philadelphia, we should do it there.’

“So 2019 comes around, we move back to Philly. I'm thinking about it, I'm gearing up for it, I registered the domain name, and then 2020 happens. But once people started to sort of come out again — and I saw my friend's bookstore, A Novel Idea, had put up a GoFundMe because they were sort of having a hard time over the course of the pandemic — I was like, ‘This is the time for this.’ We have this amazing independent bookstore community. We want to keep them here, so let's get people to show up and go to them.

“So that's how it got together last year. I sent out some awkward emails to say like, ‘Hey, I know a lot of you don't know me, but can I organize this thing?’ And, and off we went.”

How does this year's lineup of events and participating stores compare to last year's?

“There must be at least a dozen more [participating stores]. We have a comic book shop involved this year, Brave New Worlds in Old City. We have previews of a new bookstore that's opening up soon, Binding Agents, a cookbook shop in the Italian Market. And there are new bookstores that just opened last year that are participating, like Multiverse out in Chestnut Hill. It’s a lot of new stuff, which is really fun.”

In the process of organizing this event, is there anything new you've learned?

“I feel like I learned a little bit more about just how many authors are in Philadelphia. I felt like I was pretty close to the writing scene as somebody who also writes books, but when I launched the bookstore crawl, I heard from people that I had no idea lived here. I heard from all these memoirists, I heard from cookbook authors, I heard from poets that I had never spoken to before.

“It turns out there's a lot more writers out there who are very excited at the prospect of working with their indie bookstores. Some of them didn't necessarily know how to do that, so it was a really great experience in community building and trying to bring more people together.”