Run, don't crawl: Local bookstores celebrate National Book Month

Bookshelves got a little more crowded this weekend, courtesy of this year’s Chapelboro Book Crawl on Saturday.

Five local independent bookstores participated, offering sales, discounts, free merchandise and raffle prizes to celebrate both local bookstores and National Book Month, which is held each October. The sales lasted all day, within each store’s business hours. 

This year marks the 20th annual National Book Month, which was founded by the National Book Foundation, but it is the first ever book crawl event in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

Bookworms hopped from Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill to Golden Fig Books at the Carr Mill Mall in Carrboro, with stops at Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews, The Concern Newsstand and Peel Gallery in between.

Visitors could pick up a punch card from any of the five locations. A sticker was added for each store visited, which also counted as an additional entry into a raffle for various gift cards and prizes from the participating stores.

An otherwise gloomy, rainy Saturday did not stop crowds from filling their punch cards, though locations like Peel Gallery moved some of their discounts on books and zines online for those book enthusiasts who wanted to stay dry.

Lindsay Metivier, the owner and director of Peel Gallery and one of the planners of the book crawl, said that several businesses had run out of punch cards by 1 p.m. and that staff were printing more the whole day.

Metivier and Mimi Stockton, the assistant director at Peel Gallery, began reaching out to nearby bookstores about a month ago to plan the crawl.

They wanted to promote the celebration of local bookstores rather than competition between them, Metivier said. She also said that they hope it is the first of many annual book crawls in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

“We're excited that Chapel Hill and Carrboro is becoming a destination for used books and art books and small publishers, smaller imprints,” Metivier said.

The crawl included staples of Chapel Hill as well as lesser-known hidden gems, like The Concern Newsstand. 

Though it has a primary internet presence, The Concern had a pop-up location at Attic 506 on the second floor of 506 W. Franklin St., where it offers local zines and art books. According to owner and local artist, Orvokki Crosby, the book crawl marked the shop’s last weekend at its current location. Despite the timing, she welcomed the event for awareness of her online shop.

“I am not a traditional bookstore. I'm more of an art project, so a lot of people don't really know about it,” she said. “So it helps with advertising what I'm doing to a wider audience.”

Along with raising awareness for smaller businesses, the book crawl focused on one of the National Book Foundation’s central values — that books protect and stimulate necessary discourse.

“We're seeing an unprecedented rise in censorship and book bannings and basically, the marketplace of ideas being very much encroached upon and attempts to stifle it out,” Liv LaMarca, a bookseller at Golden Fig Books, said.

He said that events like the book crawl increase access to local bookstores, which in turn are able to put ideas and discourse into the hands of anyone interested. 

“Maintaining those spaces is critical for maintaining the integrity of our ability as humans to come together and have discourses and have conversations that are difficult to have — but that ultimately move us forward,” they said.

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