Step away from your Amazon shopping cart. Put down your Kindle. Now, grab a cute canvas book bag and head to your neighborhood bookstore. You're about to fall in love again with the scent of paperbacks and the healing rhythm of thumbing through actual pages.
Saturday, April 27, is the perfect day to rediscover everything that's great about your local bookstore — or 21 of them. It's the fifth Seattle-area installment of Independent Bookstore Day, launched to promote and celebrate the small, local booksellers that dot our communities.
Make it an adventure: Pack up the kids for a day of seeing new neighborhoods, supporting local businesses and loving books and bookstores.
Many stores will have authors on hand, and some will be giving away prizes. There will also be live music, cupcakes, a scavenger hunt, kids' activities, art tables, and other fun stuff.
- Ada's Technical Books (Capitol Hill), for instance, promises poems, jokes, stories, drink specials, and maybe even puppets.
- Third Place Books (Ravenna, Lake Forest Park, Seward Park) promises "Games! Giveaways! Prizes! Surprises! Author visits!"
- Secret Garden Books in Ballard is also celebrating the 100th anniversary of The Secret Garden with cake and fun photo ops.
- Lots of shops will kick off the day with coffee and pastries, and Island Books in Mercer Island has famous typewriters you can try, plus pizza and happy hour beer.
Organizers have issued an ambitious challenge, but it comes with a generous reward: Get a passport stamped at all 21 stores, earn a 25 percent discount, at all stores, for a whole year! Last year, nearly 500 hearty souls achieved this.
Here's the quandary: With the fun activities planned at a lot of shops (not to mention the books), the temptation would be to linger. But with stores scattered throughout Seattle, on the Eastside and even across the water (Bainbridge Island, Poulsbo and Bremerton), revelers must be efficient to hit them all. There's also a smaller reward: a one-time, 30 percent coupon (good at any participating store) for people who visit three of them on Saturday.
The official website for the event has all the details, a list of stores and a really cool map showing the locations. It does not, however, offer a strategy for traveling among them. Maybe that's a good challenge for your geography-oriented child.
There's also a Facebook page for the event, and of course it has a social-media hashtag, too: #SEABookstoreDay.
