For the past 10 years, the last Saturday in April has been Independent Bookstore Day. The celebration began in New York City, where one of the organizers, Emma Straub, opened a bookstore called Books Are Magic. My brother, who used to live near this store in Brooklyn, gifted me a Books Are Magic tote bag, which I have used ever since to swap books with friends. I purchase many of these books at McIntyre’s in Pittsboro, my magical bookstore.
My McIntyre’s stories include the children’s reading hour with the incomparable Johanna Banana, the bookends discussions moderated by the erudite Dr. Wayne Pond, and readings by North Carolina authors Dale Neal, Bland Simpson, Jill McCorkle, and Belle Boggs. I’ve been coming to McIntyre’s for so long that I recently heard Professor Boggs’s daughter read her children’s book.
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In her foreword to Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores, the poet, activist, and superwoman Nikki Giovanni compared a local library to a university and a local bookstore to a living room. This comparison rings a delight bell for me, and not only because I have read Giovanni’s poems in the reading room at McIntyre’s. A living room is the most public room of your private residence. It’s where you play host and engage in conversations. You decorate and accessorize your living room to welcome others as well as display your tastes, which by extension are your values.
It's values that are at the heart of a local independent bookstore. We live in a time when problems of isolation, inequality, and hostility are not going to be solved by Amazon. There’s a need for a personal touch, such as a smile like Johanna Banana’s or a recommendation from a staff member like Pete Mock. We need to find new authors among the shelves as well as new friends while browsing. Since the creation of Independent Bookstore Day, the number of bookstores across the country has risen by 13 percent. That’s a start. We need more funky, friendly, clean, warm, little bookstores on village greens.
McIntyre’s is magic, and perhaps most so in the children’s section by the window, where the light, whether honey-glazed or silvery-grey, streams upon a child sitting on the floor, a book in their lap. This child is at the bookstore and also somewhere else — transported by the magic of words.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of Little Big Moments, a collection of mini-essays about parenting, and Tigers, Mice & Strawberries: Poems. Both titles are available most anywhere books are sold online. Taylor-Troutman lives in Chapel Hill where he serves as pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church and occasionally stumbles upon the wondrous while in search of his next cup of coffee.