Bookshops lend themselves easily to Instagram. So much effort goes into the design of each book, and then into their presentation in a shop, that the results can't help but dazzle.
--TimeOut London in a piece headlined: "London has one of the most Instagrammable bookshops in the world"
How did you celebrate National Book Lovers Day 2020? Housebound, perhaps, by an earlier Covid-19 pandemic variant (in an apparently endless series), you might have had a hard time of it. Or maybe you didn't, since celebrating this particular unofficial holiday can so easily be accomplished with just a novel, cup of tea and cozy reading chair.
So, do you have more ambitious plans for National Book Lovers Day 2021 this coming Monday, August 9? No? What's that? You mean to tell me you've never heard of it?
My own annual festivities have long been AWOL, too, but I did have a great excuse. Despite being a lifelong reader and a relatively professional book person, I'd never had #NationalBookLoversDay cross my path. But now I have, thanks to the Knowledge Academy, which provides classroom and online training courses globally, and introduced me to the holiday in an e-mail earlier this week.
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| The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles | |
This is what I learned: For National Book Lovers Day 2021, the Knowledge Academy commissioned an Instagram exploration to find the most "Insta-worthy" bookstores around the world in an effort to help book lovers "gather inspiration for their travel bucket lists." The goal was to determine the most picture-worthy bookstores by analyzing Instagram hashtag volumes.
How, you might ask, does a bookshop achieve high-end Instagrammability? Good question. Employing in-house metrics, the Knowledge Academy created a seed list of famous bookstores worldwide, based on total Instagram hashtag counts that were collected for each store. Where appropriate, variations of each hashtag were considered, then all the data was amalgamated and ranked. According to the study, the top 15 bookstores Insta-worthy bookstores worldwide are:
- The Last Bookstore, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S. (110,498 hashtags)
- Powell's Books, Portland, Ore., U.S. (94,241)
- Book and Bed, Tokyo, Japan (83,989)
- Shakespeare and Company, Paris, France (80,660)
- Livraria Lello, Porto, Portugal (76,042)
- Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice, Italy (43,793)
- Cărturești Carusel, Bucharest, Romania (36,854)
- BooksActually, Singapore (24,635)
- City Lights Books, San Francisco, Calif., U.S. (21,452)
- Daunt Books, London, England (21,121)
- Barter Books, Alnwick, England (14,331)
- El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires, Argentina (13,952)
- Livraria Ler Devagar, Lisbon, Portugal (10,552)
- El Pendulo, Mexico City, Mexico (9,521)
- Atlantis Books, Santorini, Greece (6,933)
For the U.S., in addition to taking gold and silver medals in the unofficial Knowledge Academy Instagram Hashtag Olympics with the Last Bookstore ("Their doors first opened in 2005 and this now two-story shop filled with over 250,000 new and used books, has become one of the largest independent bookstores in the world," the Knowledge Academy noted) and Powell's Books ("has been serving as an oasis for booklovers since 1971 which just goes to show that paperbacks aren't going out of fashion anytime soon"), the legendary destination bookshop City Lights also made the top 10.
Time Out London was one of the first media outlets to feature the Insta-worthy list this week, reporting Wednesday that the city "obviously has plenty of beautiful bookshops, but only one made it into the Knowledge Academy's top 10 most Instagrammable bookshops in the world chart: Daunt Books came in at number 10--and it's not hard to see why. Daunt's Marylebone branch is a long, narrow refuge of deep oak bannisters, ornate green lamps and arching stained glass. Opened in 1912, it claims to have been the first custom-built bookshop in the world."
Checking in Thursday was TimeOut Los Angeles, which noted: "The Last Bookstore's arched tunnels of tomes and peekaboo windows of hardcovers are an Instagram fixture, but we're not sure we ever realized just how popular they really are."
Some of the booksellers in the top 15 are quite familiar stops for gorgeous bookshops of the world list aficionados, among whom I am a card-carrying member in good standing. We've all seen the usual suspects over the years ("Coolest Bookstores Around The World"; "The World’s Most Beautiful Bookstores"; "12 Beautiful Bookstores That Are Worth Traveling For"; even, coincidentally, "11 of the most Instagrammable Bookshops in the World").
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| Barter Books, Alnwick, England | |
Atlantis Books ("Established in 1922 by magicians it's said to be a birth-place of modern witchcraft, with coven meetings held regularly in their basement," the Knowledge Academy wrote) has long been a staple of those lists, as have Shakespeare and Company and Livraria Lello.
Singapore's wonderful BooksActually, alas, had to transition to an online-only bookshop during the Covid-19 pandemic, but owner Kenny Leck seems to be doing well despite the loss of his beautiful bricks-and-mortar location.
Between the Covid-19 Delta variant, airline delays and international travel restrictions, Instagram may be the best way to travel anywhere at the moment, so visiting these irresistible bookshops will have to be a virtual adventure. Perhaps I'll celebrate National Book Lovers Day on Monday with the proverbial book, coffee and cozy chair combo and, at some point, work in an Instagram tour of beautiful bookshops worldwide to imagine the possibilities. Guess that's what a reader's mind does best anyway.