Independent Bookstore Day 2022 – Island Outliers

Despite my love for filling up passports and my obsession with completeness, I’ve never tried to “win” Independent Bookstore Day for two reasons. First, getting to all the bookstores in one day is too hard. And second, getting to all the bookstores in one day doesn’t leave time for actually browsing the bookstores, and I can never leave a bookstore unexplored once I enter. So each year, I’ve made my own goals. This year was my most challenging.

Bookstore Day History

My first Independent Bookstore Day, I discovered the existence of the event on social media around lunchtime. I piled the kids in the car, and starting with the bookstores closest to the house, just tried to get to as many as possible with the time that was left. In 2016 I tried to get to all the bookstores in Seattle proper, and half accomplished it. In 2018, my practice of buying something at each store (after all, the point is to support small bookstores) made me pull back and take a minimalist approach.

Independent Bookstore Day 2022

After going virtual during the pandemic, Independent Bookstore Day is back in 2022. With 24 bookstores in 27 different locations, and in the interest of spreading out the crowds, this year they are giving people 10 days to visit all the stores. The prize is smaller (a one-time 20% discount at each store instead of a year-long discount). At first I thought the extra days would make this my year to conquer. But it’s something I do with my kids, which knocks out the weekdays, and my oldest works one day each weekend. Visiting 24 bookstores in 2 days seems a little less doable.

So this year, we set a goal of reaching the bookstores we’ve never tried to get to before.

Island Outliers

I spent way too much time on Google maps planning routes and then couldn’t make them embed properly here. But the plan was to hit all the bookstores you can only reach by ferry. We left the house at 7:30 in the morning to head downtown and catch the Bainbridge ferry. We had breakfast in Bainbridge before the first bookstore opened.

Then we drove to Poulsbo where we visited two more bookstores and got boba (it was also National Bubble Tea Day) before catching the Kingston ferry to Edmonds, where there were two more shops to visit. That completed the Island Outliers itinerary, but we weren’t ready to tap out. So after a snack at a cute little tea shop, we hit the three participating stores that could kind of be described as “on the way home.” Read on for details and descriptions of the eight bookstores we hit on day one.

Eagle Harbor Book Co.

By far the largest and best-stocked independent bookstore we visited on this tour was like the Elliott Bay Bookstore for island folks. They have all the bookstore goodies, great local interest/local author representation, and a broad selection of new releases that felt very curated – they weren’t the same books you see everywhere.

It wasn’t part of Independent Bookstore Day, and wasn’t even open before we left town, but there is a second bookstore just a few doors down from Eagle Harbor. When we go back to explore Bainbridge more fully, we will definitely check out Backstreet Books and Records, which I believe is all second-hand.

Liberty Bay Books

Located on the main strip of the historic downtown section of Poulsbo, Liberty Bay Books seemed small in comparison to Eagle Harbor. But they used their limited space well, even making room for a small section of books in Spanish. Naturally, there was a sizeable Nordic section (they even had Eliza Reid’s new book Secrets of the Sprakkar) and a good bit of local interest as well.

BookIt Nook

Not gonna lie, BookIt Nook, on the corner of a Poulsbo strip mall, did not look promising from the outside. But it turned out to be my daughter’s favorite bookstore of the day. Like Narnia, it was bigger on the inside than the outside, with an entire back room devoted to kids’s books. The hallway between the adults and children’s sections was lined with YA books in a bit of poetic justice. Used books were mixed in with the new ones, and even though each section was no more than a couple shelves, they contained all the most interesting and relevant options. Also, they had a pet snake (in a tank) instead of a cat, and a boba tea shop in the back.

Edmonds Bookshop

Just a few blocks from the ferry terminal, the area around Edmonds Bookshop was hopping, with a farmers market and street musicians drawing crowds that kept us from even trying our planned lunch spot. We had visited Edmonds Bookshop once before as part of a previous Bookstore Day. Nearly half the store is given over to children’s and YA books (something we appreciated more back then than we do now). They also have a small section dedicated to second hand books. I think of Edmonds Bookshop as a very classic community bookshop for folks who want to keep up with their reading without relying on Amazon.

The Neverending Bookshop

Technically The Neverending Bookshop is also in Edmonds, but it felt like uncharted territory for us. Hidden in a sort of strip mall behind a strip mall, we almost gave up on finding it after circling the parking lot. Inside the soulless commercial space was one of the quirkiest bookstores I’ve been to. There was a small room for children’s books built into the center of the space. The right hand side of the bookstore was all YA, and the left side was all genre. They had bookcases of sci-fi/fantasy, of romance, and of mysteries. I didn’t notice any bestsellers or general fiction. The tiny nonfiction section focused mostly on gender and disability. And honestly, it was kind of great.

In the same building as the bookshop there was a teashop with fancy china and a twee menu. By this time we were getting lax on documenting our experience, but after filling up on fruit cups and Italian sodas, we were ready for more bookstores.

Wise Owl Books and Music

I read about Wise Owl Books and Music in the paper a few weeks back and had been meaning to check it out, so we tacked it on to the end of our day. Tucked into a spot so tiny we actually walked right past it, Wise Owl started out as a pop-up bookstore selling only second-hand fantasy and mystery books. These are still the focus but now there are new books, and I noticed a healthy bit of poetry had been added to the stock. Despite the tiny space, Wise Owl was hosting an orchid pop-up sale and behind the racks of vinyl, a DJ was spinning our shopping soundtrack while an artist painted a portrait of Grogu. As my oldest said, “The vibe was immaculate.”

Phinney Books

Phinney Books is kind of our home store. I often pass their themed window displays on my pandemic walks and it’s usually the first place I go when I’m looking for a book and don’t want to order online. Although we don’t need their kids’ section as much as we used to, I still rely on them for fiction beyond the bestsellers and interesting nonfiction titles. We couldn’t skip them when they were practically on the way home.

The Book Larder

The Book Larder really was on the way home; it is the closest bookstore to my house. I’m no cook, and my husband doesn’t use cookbooks, but oddly, I always find something interesting when I go there anyway. This time it was The Otaku Cookbook, a collection of recipes based on foods that feature in the plots of anime. So beef and pepper stir fry for Cowboy Bebop; onigiri for Fruits Basket; and ramen for Naruto.

We were tempted to keep going. It wasn’t quite 5 pm, and the University Bookstore and Third Place Ravenna weren’t that far away. But home was even closer, so we called it a day. In the end, we spent nearly 10 hours and took two ferries to visit eight bookstores, five of which we’d never visited before. We bought ten books and brought home four blind date books. I couldn’t fit them all on my TBR shelf.

After spending too much time trying to figure out how to get to the remaining 16 bookstores, I threw up my hands. We might try our luck next weekend. Or we might stay home and read all day.