• Alex Driehaus
• Co-owners Kari Meutsch and Kristian Preylowski at Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock

For Kari Meutsch, co-owner of Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, the perpetual challenge for her business is that it's "easy to click a button" to buy a book online, rather than shop in person.

But algorithms can't replicate a bookstore's curation or local flair or the serendipity of happening upon a title you didn't know you were looking for, Meutsch said. Her Upper Valley store, along with independent bookstores across Vermont, will remind locals of the value of their brick-and-mortar stores on Independent Bookstore Day this Saturday, April 29.

"It's not just a store. It's a community gathering place," Meutsch said of her business, adding that Independent Bookstore Day is an opportunity "to reiterate the importance of coming in and experiencing our shops in real time."

Yankee Bookshop, nearby Norwich Bookstore, and Hanover, N.H., shops Left Bank Books and Still North Books & Bar will host a bookstore crawl as part of the festivities to encourage participants to visit all four shops in one day.

Additionally, Yankee Bookshop will sell slightly damaged books for $3 per pound in its "Books by the Pound" fundraiser, with all proceeds going to the Woodstock Community Food Shelf. Norwich Bookstore will offer its annual Independent Bookstore Day "blind date with a book." After spending $25, customers will have the opportunity to pick a free book wrapped in brown paper to conceal the title and author. (Clues, such as "dark sci-fi with bears," will be written on the wrapping.)

"It connects you to a book that you have no idea what you're getting," Norwich Bookstore co-owner Sam Kaas said. "You've got a vague idea, but you're probably going to end up with something new and surprising."

Independent Bookstore Day was founded in 2014 to celebrate locally owned bookshops in an age of Amazon. Ninety-three California bookstores participated in the inaugural event, dubbed "California Bookstore Day." The celebration went national the next year and now occurs annually on the last Saturday of April.

The number of independent bookstores in the U.S. dropped 43 percent in the five years after Amazon emerged in 1995, according to the American Booksellers Association. But as sellers learned to adapt, the association said, independent bookstores experienced a remarkable resurgence, with their number up 49 percent between 2009 and 2018.

• File: Sarah Priestap
• Co-owners Sam Kaas and Emma Nichols of Norwich Bookstore

They're thriving in Vermont. A 2022 study commissioned by typing.com found four bookstores per 100,000 people in Vermont, second only to Wyoming for the number of bookstores per capita. Surely contributing to the success of Vermont's 24 indie bookstores is the same study's finding that Vermonters love to read more than the residents of any other state, with New England neighbors Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts finishing third, fourth and eighth, respectively. (Sitting in front of a fire with a good book may be a common contributing factor here).

Community engagement is a key part of any independent bookstore's mission, Kaas said. He distinguishes between his "literal" job selling books and his "actual" job of creating opportunities for people to come together.

Content creation is another way local bookstores reach customers. In 2010, Norwich Bookstore colleagues Lisa Christie and Lisa Cadow cofounded the Book Jam, an organization that hosts book-themed events and offers an outlet for the pair's literary commentary. The Book Jam started as a radio show in which the two talked books and shared recommendations, but they found sound production cost prohibitive, so they quickly pivoted to a blog.

Over the years, Christie and Cadow joked about reviving the radio show as a podcast, but they didn't want to do it by themselves. In 2022, Christie approached three bookstores with an idea for a podcast called "Shelf Help" — a show in which local bookstore owners answer listeners' questions about what they should read next.

"We found that each of the bookstore owners was interested in doing something collaborative with each other," Christie said. "This just seemed like the stars had aligned."

The podcast took off as a joint effort between the Book Jam, Norwich Bookstore, Yankee Bookshop and Still North Books & Bar. The nonprofit Junction Arts & Media in White River Junction, formerly known as CATV, handles the sound engineering.

Listeners send in highly specific requests, from books featuring "protagonists in their 80s who aren't super-depressed about their age" to books "that provide feminist rethinkings and revisionings of the hero cycle." Other queries are more open-ended — one listener wrote in that she was simply looking for "stories that aren't about Christmas."

The podcast has had more than 2,000 downloads since its start last year, according to Meutsch.

"Independent bookstore owners are very, very good at hand-selling to whoever is in front of them," Christie said. "And so offering them an opportunity to sort of hand-sell over the air to someone who needed help finding a book was very appealing."

Independent bookstores also feature local and up-and-coming authors whose work is often unavailable online or in big-box stores. Hartland author Jo Knowles said her relationship with Yankee Bookshop has been integral to her books' visibility.

"Barnes & Noble, unless I'm a best-selling author, they're not even going to stock my books," Knowles said. "We [lesser-known authors] really rely on independent bookstores to support us."

Her relationship with Yankee allows Knowles to add a personal touch. Whenever a customer orders one of her books from the store, Knowles drives a few miles from her house to sign it with an individualized message.

For Left Bank Books owner Rena Mosteirin, the ability to find unusual books is a key part of shopping in small stores. Mosteirin used to frequent Left Bank Books while studying creative writing at Dartmouth. She started reading experimental poetry from the used bookstore, and it "lit up her world."

"That's part of the reason I own the store now," Mosteirin said. "To help people to find things that are not necessarily popular or at the center of a certain conversation but things that will inspire them."

Now, in addition to running Left Bank Books, Mosteirin teaches experimental poetry workshops at Dartmouth and writes her own experimental poetry.

Like Mosteirin, Kaas and Meutsch both said they were motivated to buy their stores to serve their communities.

"There's something about coming into a bookstore and talking to a person who knows what's in that store and can zero in on what you're looking for," Kaas said. "That just can't be replicated by a machine no matter how hard we try."