A passport to the grand prize: Seven independent bookstores participating in inaugural Pioneer Valley Bookstore Crawl

You’ve heard of a bar crawl, but what about a bookstore crawl?

The first Pioneer Valley Bookstore Crawl, which started earlier this month and runs until Saturday, Aug. 30, aims to boost foot traffic to local independent bookstores – with a $350 prize as an incentive.

The participating bookstores are Amherst Books (Amherst), Booklink Booksellers (Northampton), Book Moon Books (Easthampton), Broadside Bookshop (Northampton), Carle Museum Bookshop (Amherst), High Five Books (Florence), and Odyssey Bookshop (South Hadley).

Here’s how it works: To start, pick up a passport from any of the participating bookstores or print one out at home from the link below. Then, visit each store and get a stamp or signature on its respective square. (No purchases are necessary to participate.)

Once your passport is fully filled out, drop it off at any of the participating stores by Saturday, Aug. 30. The winner will be contacted and announced on Friday, Sept. 5.

The grand prize is a collection of $350 worth of books – specifically, one $50 gift card to each of the participating stores.

Kinsey Foreman, manager of High Five Books, co-created the Bookstore Crawl with Laure Colodner, kids department coordinator at Odyssey Bookshop. Foreman said she was inspired after going to a conference hosted by the New England Independent Bookseller Association, which had a panel on bookstore crawls.

“A couple bookstores from the Pioneer Valley were also there, and we just kept saying to each other, ‘This needs to happen in western Mass!’” Foreman said.

Foreman and Colodner decided that 2025 would be the right year for it to happen, though it’d be “a prototype year” – rather than invite every single independent bookstore in the area, they’d start small, figuring out any logistical complications with the initial group before making plans to expand more widely. It also made sense to hold a promotional event in the summer (rather than, for example, in April, when Independent Bookstore Day is) because bookstores in the Pioneer Valley often see a decline in foot traffic during the season as Five College students return home and local families go on vacation.

The response so far, though, has been positive; in fact, on the first day of the Bookstore Crawl, High Five ran out of passports and had to print more.

“It gives me a lot of hope for it growing and getting even bigger next year,” Foreman said.

Several bookstore representatives who spoke to the Gazette said that a perk of the Bookstore Crawl is being able to showcase the unique “something” that each store brings to the community, especially to people who may have never visited that store. For High Five, a large part of that “something” is their store itself, which, as of early this year, now has couches and reading nooks and aims to provide “joyful, inclusive, and affirming spaces for kids,” Foreman said.

For the Carle Museum Bookshop, their “something” is not only their picture book collection, but also their role in the museum overall – retail manager Eliza Brown said that most of their visitors through the Bookstore Crawl have never been in the store before. Even though the Bookshop is free to visit without paying museum admission, it’s not often a place people think of “when you think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go to a bookstore,’ ” she said, so “it’s great to remind people about that.”

“I hope everyone gets charmed by our store and wants to come back,” she said, “It’s great just to get people in the door.”

“There’s no rivalry between the independent bookstores in the area — we all want each other to succeed,” said Ruth Daniel, assistant manager of Book Moon Books, in an email. “Each shop has its own unique flavor, so it’s worth visiting them all. Encouraging people to support local bookstores instead of big corporations isn’t just good for business, it’s a way of building community.”

Foreman agreed that supporting local bookstores (rather than Amazon or big-box stores) helps build community.

“We just try to give people a really good experience that they’re not gonna get when it’s a little less personal,” she said. “We know people’s names and we recognize their kids, and we’re able to give really personal book recommendations.”

“I think that independent bookstores just add so much to the community, but it really is a reciprocal relationship,” she said. “I feel like we try to give to the community, and the community gives back to us. It just grows exponentially from there.”

For more information or to print out a passport, visit highfivebooks.org/pages/pvbc25.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].