“Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.”
― Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book

In the past month, I’ve held book signings at two remarkable Iowa independent bookstores: By the Hearth Bookshop and Coffee House in Bloomfield and Beaverdale Books in Des Moines. These bookstores are two of the country’s 2,844 independent bookstores, according to The American Booksellers Association. Like their fellow bookshops, they’re keeping the magic alive.

In his blog post, “How Bookstores in America are Thriving in 2025,” John Roberts cites how these shops create and nurture a sense of community:

One of the most significant ways bookstores are thriving in 2025 is by fostering a sense of community. Stores are hosting author talks, book signings, and writing workshops that bring readers and writers together. These events not only drive foot traffic but also create a loyal customer base that values the bookstore as a cultural hub.

While I was talking with employees from Beaverdale Books before my book signing, they spoke passionately of their loyal customers who supported the store during the pandemic. Although the store was closed for months, many customers phoned in their book orders and gratefully received them in the parking lot. Others made donations to ensure the business stayed alive. All felt bound by the sense of community their favorite bookstore offered and eagerly returned when it reopened. In my community of Bloomfield, I’ve heard so many residents confess how much they love By the Hearth Bookshop and how it has blessed our community. The bookshop hosts book signings, book clubs, writing classes, Bible studies, and children’s events. It also offers exceptional food and coffee. Like so many other independent bookstores, it serves as a cultural hub.

During the past decade, I’ve read many books about bookstores: historical and contemporary fiction, fantasy, best-sellers, and debut novels. In these works, the bookstore is a place to fall in love, to pass and receive secret messages, to meet with other spies and resistance workers, and to find refuge and delight when life takes us to the mat. Although most of us don’t visit bookstores to drop off coded messages, we do come for the sensory experience: the smell of so many books in their neat stacks, the feel of a book spine in our hands, the sound of customers murmuring recommendations for future reading—or the absence of sound, the beneficent quiet that invites browsing and soulful wandering. You can’t get these sensations from a Kindle or phone. It’s the tangible book in hand. It’s the way your fingers know the way through pages. It’s the way you can talk easily with anyone in the store about the characters in your favorite series, the way you can openly lament finishing a book and bidding farewell to characters who’ve become like family to you. It’s the way you move through the shelves in wonder, eager to discover a book that will make your day and likely change your life.

It’s all this and so much more writes editor and publisher Jason Epstein:

A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.

For me and many others, a bookstore is a sanctuary, a sacred meeting place. Like the best poetry, it offers us, in the words of Robert Frost, a “temporary stay against confusion.” In her book, Tilly and the Bookwanderers, Anna James writes that a bookshop “is like a map of the world. There are infinite paths you can take through it and none of them are right or wrong.” Amidst life’s confusion, a bookshop, James contends, gives readers “landmarks to help them find their way.”

As we navigate our loud and increasingly divisive world, we might consider the words of author Jane Smiley:

A bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order, and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them.

In a bookstore, competing voices live within the pages of its books, and we’re free to pick our poison—or not. Smiley is right: a bookstore is one of the few places where all these voices—traditional and progressive, spiritual and material, real and fantastical—live companionably within the same walls.

Writers have a particular love affair with bookstores. In Stephen King’s Wasteland, he describes the smell of entering a bookstore as “coming home.” Author Anna Quindlen believes many writers and readers feel about bookstores “the way some people feel about jewelers.” In Paris by the Book, Liam Callanan describes a bookstore as “a safe-deposit box for civilization.” Novelist Nicole Krauss describes a bookstore experience as “a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that could be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.” And writer Jen Campbell claims, “bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places.”

Before we sold our family home in Kearney, Nebraska, we investigated the possibility of transforming it from a home to a bookstore. Two of my sisters’ friends were hunting for a bookstore location, and located a few blocks from the university, our house seemed a perfect site. I was thrilled with the prospect of others browsing, reading, and drinking coffee in the places my family had enjoyed for years. But an architect delivered bad news: our home lacked the structural bones to hold the weight of so many shelves and books. Still, these entrepreneurs continued the search and secured a wonderful location. Soon, they will join the family of independent bookstore owners as they launch their new store, Open Book, where they will keep the magic of printed books alive.

As I was packing up to leave Beaverdale Books, I discovered both employees were ardent Elizabeth Strout fans. Within moments, we shared our mutual respect for Strout’s ability to craft characters who felt like real friends. We spoke of the loss we felt as we finished her books. We confessed our great hope that Strout would continue writing, giving us more of the characters and settings we loved. We shared a sense of community: with each other, with these fictional characters, and with the world of booklovers at large. I left the store inordinately happy.

In his novel, American Gods, British writer Neil Gaiman confirms what many of us believe:

What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.

So, here’s to the independent bookstore, the heart and hub of our communities! And let’s not fool a soul: a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. Perhaps now more than ever, we need the magic of printed books. A bookstore is vital in keeping this magic alive.