40 Bookshops under 40

What a Year of Indie Bookshops Taught Me About Books, Reading, and Myself

4/7/2026

Part 3 of 3: Book influencers, German policy, and making peace with an ever-growing to-read stack

Bookshops I found through the algorithm (and am grateful for)

Since I spent a lot of time researching bookshops, the algorithm eventually caught on. I came upon some pretty fascinating bookshop content that I probably would have missed otherwise.
Some indie bookshops have built impressive followings on Instagram, blurring the line between bookseller and influencer. Some of them do both extremely well:

I watched Ally and Matt turn an empty storefront in Bournemouth, England, into The Mysterious Bookcase. Here's their Instagram account.
I started following Emillie, who runs a multilingual bookshop in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and shares her day-to-day with over 163,000 followers (at the time of writing).
My favorite, perhaps, is Sherlock and Pages. Its charismatic owner, Luke Sherlock (no joke!), takes you into the world of his whimsical bookshop in Somerset, England, where one of the top-performing book sections is nun literature (yes, you read that right). With only 400 posts at the time of writing, he has a following of close to 100,000 people on Instagram, and that doesn’t include his personal account (303,000).

Favorites, Surprises, and Unexpected Ideas from 54 Indie Bookshop Visits

4/7/2026

Part 2 of 3: The bookshops that stopped me in my tracks and the ideas I’d love to see everywhere

Across 54 visits, I kept encountering inventive curation, unexpected events, and approaches to bookselling I had never considered. These are my favorites: 100% subjective, entirely enthusiastic.

What 54 Indie Bookshops Taught Me About Running a Great Bookshop

4/7/2026

Part 1 of 3: The invisible labor, the lingering, and the curation that makes great bookshops possible

I set out to visit 40 independent bookshops before my 40th birthday. In the end, I visited 54 across two continents, four countries, and 18 cities. Along the way, I learned that great bookshops are not defined by square footage, bestseller tables, or even coffee quality (though they all help create a great experience!). They are shaped by curation, community, and an enormous amount of invisible labor that most customers never see. This is what a year inside indie bookshops taught me.

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