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

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).
  

Fires in bookshops are more common than you might think

Since I started #40BookshopsUnder40, two of the shops I visited caught fire:

• Friends to Lovers caught fire shortly after they had successfully crowdfunded to start their shop. They had to move and replace their entire inventory before opening in their new location in Old Town Alexandria.
• Middleburg Books experienced a fairly minor fire by the register in January 2026, but since books and paper products don’t take kindly to soot and smoke, Mary Beth and her team had to renovate the store and replace almost all of their inventory. Always have a fire extinguisher nearby.

You can now stay in a book-themed hotel

While I have yet to experience this type of bookish escape, here are some that look intriguing:

• The Book House Hotel in Pennsylvania looks charming.
  
• Book and Bed in Tokyo is a concept store x bookshop x hotel where you sleep in little nooks embedded in bookshelves. No private rooms, just a bunch of bed-sized nooks with a curtain to shield you from bookshoppers.
  
• In the Scottish book town of Wigtown, you can take the experience one step further and run a bookshop, The Open Book, for a week as a guest bookseller while living in the apartment upstairs. They’re booked out months in advance.
  

Lessons from Germany

Since I am German and spent four weeks in Germany researching and visiting bookstores, I gained a deeper insight into the German independent bookshop scene.


In response to slowing book sales during the weeks leading up to Christmas, eight bookstores in Berlin formed a network, the Bündnis Berliner Buchläden, to host joint events, advocate for independent bookshops, and become politically active.


In both Germany and France, book prices are fixed by law (Buchpreisbindung and Loi Lang respectively). This means publishers set the retail price, and all sellers, including Amazon, must sell new books at that price. Discounts are either prohibited or tightly limited.

Perhaps my favorite discovery this year: Büchergilde Gutenberg. Started in 1924, this guild is dedicated to preserving the traditional art of book design and binding. They publish classics and popular titles in entirely new designs and formats. Their tagline, “Welcome to beautiful books,” says it all. Over 60,000 members support their work through quarterly book purchases from a well-curated program featuring international titles, contemporary topics in culture, politics, and society, and literary journeys through current and classical works.

Partner bookshops carry Büchergilde Gutenberg titles in separate shelves and can only sell them to Büchergilde Gutenberg members! I visited a handful of them and was in awe! ocelot in Berlin, Autorenbuchhandlung am Savignyplatz and Büchergilde Hamburg are shops that carry Büchergilde Gutenberg books. 

Tsundoku: a new relationship with unread books

Over the course of 12 months, I spent an estimated $2,000 at independent bookshops. My to-read stack did not shrink. It grew.
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Yet my relationship to that stack changed completely.

Helping out at my local bookstore means I am surrounded by books daily. Where I once felt guilty about unread titles, I now see them as possibility rather than procrastination. Visiting dozens of bookshops taught me that collecting books is not hoarding.

To me, it’s an investment in my library and an invitation to explore other worlds, times, and lives from the comfort of my reading chair.

“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.”
— Luc van Donkersgoed

Books create a sense of home for me. Each move since immigrating to the United States has only felt complete once my shelves were unpacked.
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The Japanese term tsundoku captures this perfectly: acquiring books and letting them pile up, not out of neglect but for the comfort of knowing that these stories are waiting, that there are entire worlds to uncover, other people’s lived experiences, lessons, and journeys.

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
— George R.R. Martin

Beyond #40BookshopsUnder40

At no point during these twelve months did I truly want the project to end. The deadline loomed, but so did the realization that I would miss the official excuse to introduce myself to booksellers and spend entire afternoons browsing.

Of course, I no longer need that excuse.

In the Shenandoah Valley, where I live, I am now committed to supporting 14 independent bookshops. Together, we are hosting joint events and organizing our inaugural Shenandoah Valley Indie Bookshop Crawl in 2026.

What began as a birthday challenge became a way of seeing. I now walk into every bookshop with deeper respect for the care, courage, and creativity required to keep these spaces alive.

Wherever you are reading this from, please consider buying your next book at an independent shop. Your purchase sustains not just a business, but a cultural space where stories, conversations, and communities continue to grow.

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