Hi nerds,

It’s six days before Independent Bookstore Day, our third one at Sunny’s. I’m writing this from an airport, on my way back from a very chaotic four days in New York. I was there for my day job, bookselling at our publisher booth and helping produce our presence at a reader event (BookCon!) that brought in something like 25,000 people. Which means, naturally, it all lined up to happen the same week as IBD!

Somewhere in the middle of the event—on the floor, behind the booth, watching people move through this huge, loud, living system of books and readers and publishers, holding the very books I have spent years of my professional life on—I kept having this very simple thought:

This is what it looks like when all of this works.

Publishers making the books. Readers showing up for them. And in between, this constant, necessary act of connection: putting the right thing in the right hands.

I kept thinking about how rare it is to see the whole chain in one place like that, and how much of it actually depends on smaller, quieter spaces to hold things together day to day.

Independent bookstores are one of those spaces.

Not the scale of a convention floor. Just smaller. Closer. One book at a time, one conversation at the counter, someone coming in unsure of what they want to read and leaving with something they didn’t expect to find. That’s what Sunny’s is trying to be part of. Community!!!

And that’s what Independent Bookstore Day is, for me. Not just a celebration of bookstores, but a reminder that this whole ecosystem only exists because people keep CHOOSING it.

Sunny’s only exists because of you. The people who stop in once while they’re downtown. The people who come in every week and have a stack going at home. The people who bring their out of town friends in when they visit. The people who DM us photos of what they’re reading after they leave.

We see it all. We feel it every day. But especially this one. So this is just a thank you. For reading with us. For choosing a small bookstore when you could buy books anywhere else. For telling people about us. For coming back. For letting this place be part of your reading life. We wouldn’t be here without that.

If you’re around, come by on Saturday. Say hi. Browse. Let us put something in your hands.

We’ll be here.

Love you! Mean it!

CJ

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