Shelf by Shelf, Mile by Mile: The Travelers Who Route Their Road Trips Through Independent Bookstores

Most road trips start with a destination. Maybe it's a national park, a beach town, a cousin's wedding in Tucson. The route is a means to an end — something to survive between gas stations and fast food drive-throughs.

But pull up the spreadsheet that Nadia Okonkwo keeps on her laptop, and you'll see something different. Column A: bookstore name. Column B: city. Column C: hours of operation, because nothing is worse than driving three hours to find a hand-lettered "Closed" sign in a dusty window. There's a color-coding system. There are notes. "Has a cat" appears more than once.

Nadia, a 34-year-old middle school art teacher from Columbus, Ohio, has built her last four summer vacations entirely around independent bookstores. Not around the cities those bookstores happen to be in. Around the bookstores themselves.

Photo: Columbus, Ohio, via i.pinimg.com

"I know it sounds a little obsessive," she says, laughing. "But honestly? Every single one of those trips has been the best travel I've ever done."

A Different Kind of Landmark

The independent bookstore road trip isn't a new idea, exactly. Book lovers have always sought out their favorite shops on the road. But something has shifted in the last few years. Online communities dedicated to the practice have grown steadily — subreddits, Instagram accounts, even a few newsletters — and the conversations inside them suggest that for a certain kind of traveler, the bookshop has replaced the tourist attraction as the primary reason to go somewhere at all.

It makes a certain kind of sense. A good independent bookstore is one of the few places left that still reflects the specific personality of the town it lives in. The inventory isn't algorithm-generated. The staff picks aren't corporate mandates. The smell — that particular mix of old paper, coffee, and something you can never quite name — is different in every single one.

Walk into The Bookman in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and you're walking into decades of accumulated local literary taste. Step through the door at Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia, and you feel the particular energy of a college town that takes its reading seriously. These places aren't interchangeable. They're portraits.

Photo: Avid Bookshop, via upload.wikimedia.org

Photo: The Bookman, via www.vibe.com

"I've learned more about a town from its bookstore than from any museum I've ever visited," says Marcus Teel, a freelance photographer from Portland who documents his bookstore trips on a blog he's been running since 2021. "What's on the local interest shelf. What's sold out. What the staff is excited about. It tells you everything."

The Route Itself Is the Story

For dedicated bookstore road-trippers, planning is its own kind of pleasure. Many use resources like the American Booksellers Association's IndieBound store locator as a starting point, then layer in personal recommendations from friends, fellow travelers, and the stores themselves — because one of the reliable joys of an independent bookshop is that the people who work there almost always know which other shops you should visit next.

Nadia's most recent trip took her from Columbus through Pittsburgh, into western Pennsylvania, and eventually down through West Virginia and into Virginia. She visited eleven stores over nine days. Some were grand, multi-room affairs with event calendars and bustling weekend crowds. Others were tiny, a little worn around the edges, run by a single person who knew every book on every shelf by heart.

"The small ones," she says, pausing. "They're the ones that stay with you."

There's a practical rhythm to these trips that differs from conventional tourism. You can't rush a bookstore. You can't skim it the way you might skim a museum's permanent collection when you're tired. A bookstore demands a certain quality of attention — slow, wandering, open to surprise. That pace tends to bleed into the rest of the trip. Meals get longer. Conversations with locals happen more naturally. The towns themselves open up.

"You stop into a bookstore and you end up talking to the owner for forty-five minutes," Marcus says. "And then she tells you about the diner down the street that's been there since 1958. And then you go to the diner and the guy at the counter tells you about the hiking trail nobody knows about. It just keeps unfolding."

What These Shops Are Holding

Independent bookstores have had a complicated few decades. The rise of big-box retailers, then Amazon, then e-books, seemed at various points to spell the end of the whole enterprise. And yet, according to the American Booksellers Association, the number of independent bookstores in the US has actually grown significantly over the past ten years, with over 2,500 member stores now operating across the country.

Part of that resilience is economic — people buying local, supporting small businesses with intention. But part of it is something harder to quantify. These stores are holding something that digital retail simply cannot replicate: the experience of physical discovery, the serendipity of a book you weren't looking for finding you anyway, the sense that someone — a real human being with opinions and taste — has curated this particular collection for this particular community.

For the travelers who plan their routes around them, bookstores are also holding something else. They're holding the character of places that might otherwise blur together on a long drive. They're proof that the town you're passing through has an inner life.

"Every bookstore is a story about the people who built it and the people who keep coming back," Nadia says. "And you get to walk into that story for an hour. Sometimes you find a book. Sometimes you find something you didn't know you needed."

Keep Scrolling the Map

The spreadsheet, for what it's worth, keeps growing. Nadia has started a second tab — stores she's heard about but hasn't visited yet. It's longer than the first tab.

Next summer, she's thinking about the Southwest. There are stores in Albuquerque she's been meaning to get to. A shop in Marfa, Texas that someone mentioned in a comment thread once and that she hasn't stopped thinking about since. A tiny place in a small New Mexico town that supposedly has a back room full of used poetry collections and a porch where you can sit and read for as long as you want.

She'll plan the route around them. She always does.

And somewhere along the way, she'll probably find a store she didn't know existed — one that isn't on any list, that doesn't have a strong social media presence, that's just there, doing its quiet work in a town that would feel a little emptier without it. She'll walk in. She'll stay too long. She'll leave with something she didn't plan to buy and won't regret for a second.

That's the trip. That's always been the trip.