Indie Bookstore Devotee
A brief recap of the 2025 Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl
Dearest mixers,
It’s been a full month since we’ve been here! I would say it was unintentional, and in some respects it has been. I have thought every week since my last post (about the Big Bear bald eagles, ICYMI) about what I would write and send next. But I seem to be back in my old habit of waiting for inspiration to strike in a way that sends me rushing to my laptop in a typing frenzy.
Luckily, I have a husband who constantly pushes me to keep writing even when I just don’t wanna. This time, he set me up in his own newsletter. Imagine my surprise reading his blog, ostensibly about his reading streak, when all of a sudden he’s promising that I’d be writing a recap of this year’s Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl. Got me!
I had thought that maybe it would be redundant to write about the crawl again. But this year, new bookstores were added and there was some drama about one that was removed. Each year has turned out to be its own adventure, so I might as well take y’all along for the ride.
Didn’t read last year’s saga? Catch up now at the link below:
In planning for the crawl this year, I told Derek that I probably wouldn’t hit all 26 stores due to our already busy schedule for the week. And he took that personally.
In fact, on that Friday before the crawl’s official Saturday start, he went for a walk, as he often does, and came back surprising me with a passport and five stamps—a whole day ahead of schedule. Some may say this was cheating, but I did not condone this and Derek claims he thought it started on Friday. Plus, it won’t really matter in the end, as you’ll see later.
Anyways, with a head start under our belts, we hit the pavement together the next day, a beautifully sunny Saturday. We started with Freebird Books, which is—tricky!—open only on weekends, and then worked our way towards and down the west side of Prospect Park. This is where we hit our first new store on the list, Brooklyn Superhero Supply. They sell cool toys and gadgets, as well as compilations of the writing kids have created in their workshops. Plus, their classroom is accessed through a secret door disguised as just another toy shelf! I actually gasped and said something like “oh shit!” (there were no kids around) when the bookseller opened the door. Both Derek and I each had a bit of a spy phase and some sort of spy gear when we were kids (ever heard of Spy Kids???), so this was thrilling.
Conspicuously missing from this part of the crawl was The Ripped Bodice. Exclusively a romance bookstore, The Ripped Bodice was an exciting new addition to Brooklyn and the crawl last year. I speculated to Derek that perhaps they weren’t part of this year’s crawl because they had made me, and I assume others, buy something in exchange for a stamp. Blessedly, a bookseller at another shop brought up the Bodice’s absence. Lover of drama that I am, I was more than happy to play up my sadness and curiosity at their lack of inclusion. The bookseller, in turn, was more than happy to dish that it’s possible The Ripped Bodice wasn’t asked back indeed due to their purchase requirement which wasn’t “in the spirit” of the crawl. Spicy!
Later that day, still floating on my gossip high, yet another incredible thing happened: Derek spotted and saved a baby pigeon outside of Lofty Pigeon Books’s giant pigeon mural, if you can believe that! It seemed to have fallen from its nest above and landed on the sidewalk, so Derek moved it to a nearby planter under its nest and parents. I worried that its parents would reject it since Derek had touched it, but he (as an amateur bird expert) assured me that’s actually a myth and that the pigeon would be fine.
Lofty Pigeon is also where we ended up spending the most money on several pigeon-themed merch items for Derek and two books for me:
A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon and translated by Anton Hur. Why? It’s giving Sailor Moon meets teenage witch vibes which is all I have ever wanted to be.
Cat’s People by Tanya Guerrero. Why? It’s a Filipina author writing about a Brooklyn girl with a black cat which is literally me.
From there, my legs already tired, we looped around the southernmost tip of the park and headed up its east side towards the two Crown Heights stores. First, another new shop: The Nonbinarian Bookstore. They are “an exclusively queer bookstore & mutual aid initiative distributing free queer books to book deserts in Brooklyn,” per their website, and have a lovely welcoming space with plenty of books, stickers, and candles. We also got to hang out with their mascot, Dexter!
Without knowing where time had gone, we arrived at the second spot, Café con Libros, just 20 minutes after closing. Devastated and exhausted, I could have laid down right there (not really, because that is gross). Still, we logged a whopping 27,069 steps that day; I was in bed and asleep by 9:30pm.
A couple days later, Derek had the day off so we trekked all the way down to The BookMark Shoppe. The space was half gift shop, half bookstore, but all wonder. We roamed around tables piled high with candles and vases, several shelves of yarn, and, strangely, boxes full of prayer cards, all while surrounded by book-filled walls.
Over the next few days, we traded off custody of the passport. Derek visited the stores close to his office and I trekked all the way to my old nabe, Bushwick. There I first visited Mil Mundos, where I bought a “book date” book. Wrapped in brown paper with a handwritten description on the front, it turned out to be The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. Second, I popped over to our last new shop for this year, Hive Mind Books. Doubling as a small cafe, Hive Mind highlights queer stories and authors and more radical publications and zines. I got myself a vegan (and overly salty) banana bread and a sticker of a black cat in a ghost costume.
I closed out our crawl on Thursday, collecting the last stamp at Adanne Bookshop. Unfortunately, Derek and I couldn’t finish the crawl in tandem, as he generously stayed home so our kitchen repairs could FINALLY be finished.1 Instead, I was accompanied once again by our ol’ friend D1 (see last year’s post for context) and new-to-the-blog friend, Adelaide.
At the end of each book crawl week, The Center for Fiction hosts an afterparty on Independent Bookstore Day. Attendees get a raffle ticket for each store they visited, and various items from the participating bookstores are raffled off (think several tote bags and some books). I like to get there early to snag my tickets and a good spot in the room, but the raffle always seems to favor latecomers. You see, they use one of those metal cage spinners meant for bingo balls, not hundreds of paper tickets. When the raffler spins the cage, the tickets flop over as one big pile rather than being throughly bounced around. I am extroverted enough to shoot my hand in the air when they ask who visited all 26 stores, just like I did in grade school when I knew the answer; however, I am not extroverted enough to do anything other than watch quietly and anxiously while knowing my early bird tickets would never make it out.
All that to say that despite our unintentional head start on Friday and early arrival to the afterparty, we did not win a thing. D1, however, won a lovely leather journal and pen from The Center for Fiction, even though he arrived mere moments before they started and only visited 13 stores. I’m not bitter!
My afterparty win, though, was that I met Melissa Lozada-Oliva, author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria, which I just read last month and loved! So really, the week was, for me, a great success: I got to meet an author I like, support my borough’s independent bookstores, and take some lovely walks with my husband.
P.S. Today’s title is borrowed from Panic! At the Disco’s “LA Devotee.”
ICYMI in previous posts, our kitchen had been torn apart for about two months thanks to a huge leak that affected the store below us. Our refrigerator was in the living room and the kitchen floor had a hole big enough for a grown man to fall through. Ideal!
Love this post, fun read! Bonus that we got to see both you and Derek in it!
I LOVE your annual book crawl adventures!! also, I'd definitely be bitter about that raffle prize cus WTH, GUY