Recap: Independent Bookstore Day 2025 (on the Road!)
Photos of the two charming indies I visited during a roadtrip to the beach — and what I bought at each of them
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Hi, friends.
If you’ve been here for any amount of time, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I look forward to Independent Bookstore Day every year. But my *exact* plans are typically a bit up in the air since my husband’s birthday is April 28 (today! HBD Jeff!), and it always falls on the last Saturday of April. This year, he really wanted to go to the beach — a place where he has some family and the golf (and beach) weather at the end of April is as perfect as it gets — and so we spent IBD making the second half of a 13-hour road trip.
I was sad to miss visiting my local bookstores: Golden Bee Bookshop and Parthenon Books’ celebrations in Syracuse, plus the ribbon-cutting grand opening of All My Friends Books in my hometown of Cortland, NY. But a road-trip IBD also presented a fun challenge to find a few indies along the way!
Of course, that’s easier said than done with a 10-month-old in tow. 😅 Especially after we’d had our worst week of sickness yet, including two pediatrician visits and one trip to the ER in four days (she’s okay and feeling much better now, thankfully). As I said in my Instagram stories, I was feeling disappointed that the week had left me without any bandwidth to make special IBD celebration content, but I was determined to squeeze as much bookstore joy as I could out of it. Thankfully my husband is a trouper, and we were never going to be able to drive the whole 7 hours without stopping anyway, so I made some plans. Which promptly went awry, as they always do with a baby in the mix. But we still made it work!
Saturday: Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, VA
I’d hoped to visit two or three bookstores on IBD itself: one or two along I-95, and one at our destination. Ultimately, we made it to just one: Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, VA. It’s in downtown Richmond, right off I-95, which made it the perfect place to stretch our legs a bit.
The shop itself was so charming, set on a hilly cobblestone street with brick sidewalks.
The place was absolutely packed, which we love to see. And they made the most out of every single surface in every single square foot!
I was supremely impressed by how many shelf talkers they had. So many on every single shelf. That’s how you know their staff is excellent.
They also had a very fun game where you spin the wheel for a genre and get a blind date with a book that matched.
I made a friend in the checkout line. 🐶
And here’s the haul! One for me, one for the baby. I couldn’t resist the taco! (I’ve already read Beautyland, but I didn’t own a copy. Plus my office book club is reading it this month, so get to expense it. Win-win.)
Then it was back into the car and on the road again.
Sunday: Back Again Bookshop in Myrtle Beach, SC
Unfortunately, we didn’t quite make it in time to visit the second bookstore I’d had in mind on Saturday, so I decided to have a belated adventure on Sunday instead. Back Again Bookshop in Myrtle Beach, SC is a super charming family-owned place that carries both new and used books.
They have two bookstore cats, Caramel and Midnight. I only saw Caramel, but he was a handsome little gentleman.
True to their location, they had a lot of beach reads in their used inventory (think Clive Cussler, James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, etc), and it was obvious that the new titles were thoughtfully chosen. My favorite thing was that they had a little room for each genre and had decorated it accordingly. For example, the sci-fi/fantasy room had a telescope and other fitting decor.
The YA room had a skateboard on the wall, and the children’s room even had a little activity table.
And then there was the glorious fiction section, which wrapped all the way around the main room of the store! These corners look the same in the photos, but they’re different — the second picture is the view you see after you turn left in the first picture.
And here’s the haul! Lord knows I don’t need another bookstore mug, but how could I resist? And the BOOKSTORE BABIES board book?!?!? Come on.
And that’s a wrap on IBD 2025!
As always, thanks for sharing your corner of the internet with me! It would mean a lot if you were to take a second to like this post. I’d love to hear how your Indie Bookstore Day went in the comments, too.
Finally, if you like this newsletter, please send a few friends my way.
Until next time!
— Deedi (she/her)
What a fun happy day! Love this recap!
I went to a small, new-to-me romance bookstore that has been open less than a year. I love the energy of IBD and wish we could channel it for all the other days of the year!