Ideas We Like: Bookshop Maps of Cities

Lucky London: at the London Art Book Fair last weekend, eighty-seven of London’s independent booksellers came together to launch a bookshop map of their city. The map will be a large-format, foldout map (a detail is shown above); it will be illustrated by the artist David Batchelor; and it will be available for free at each of the shops and at galleries around town. Every six months, it will be updated (to reflect any store openings and, heaven forbid, closings) with art from a new artist. I love the way the press release for the map describes the beneficialness of indie booksellers in London: they “sustain local interests and communities,” “develop alternative ways for audiences to participate in a range of cultural activities,” and “fill the gaps in the high street.”

[#image: /photos/590953d46552fa0be682c843]Clearly, New York needs a map of its own. Such a map would be bottom-heavy—we have many indie bookshops downtown and in Brooklyn, a few uptown, and, in the Bronx, Staten Island, and my own borough of Queens, none—but a clever artist could no doubt employ tricks of scale to make it appear more normal (like our subway maps, which swell Manhattan to the dimensions the M.T.A. and history have decided it deserves). Can our stores and our passion for our stores give London a run for its money? Indeed. Last night, I popped out to the New York Art Book Fair, which is on all weekend in Long Island City, and had an amazing time. There were no bookshop maps in site, merely floor after floor of beautifully designed books and broadsides, magazines and artwork—the sort of thing only sold by indies. And an enormous crowd: buying books, drinking beer in the courtyard, and talking about the glories of printed matter.

Still, we’re not quite as devoted as our British counterparts: along with the bookshop map, they’re launching a reward card called Love Your Indie, usable at more than one hundred shops. They’ve also joined forces with their newspapers. Tomorrow’s Guardian will include an Independent Bookshops Directory, a seventy-four-page guide with three-hundred and fifty stores from around the isles selected by the Guardian and the Observer. It’s all part of the papers’ “Books Season,” which includes the launch of a bunch of really fun interactive features on the papers’ sites.

Maybe one day Books Season will come to New York. Until then, here’s a rather out-of-date list of our local shops; and a lovely walk through some of the best.