The Book Shop Crawl: Nostalgic moments revisited

If the only kind of crawls you know are in and out of bed and weekend revelries taking you from one club to the next with pub crawls, prepare to be (pleasantly) surprised with The Book Shop Crawl. In a bid to support local book stores, city folk are gearing up for a curated walk that will see an expedition through Bengaluru’s most iconic bookshops on April 30.

The Book Shop Crawl that starts at Koshy’s will saunter through warm, old building boxes like Blossom Book Store, The Bookworm, Higginbothams, Gangarams Book Bureau, Goobe’s Book Republic and the Select Book Shop. “As a city or country we lack quality public libraries. The next best thing we have here is bookstores.

To be able to preserve this, we need these bookstores to exist in brick and shelves, by supporting them... This crawl is bringing together all aspects of the book community, through various creative ways,” says Vidhi who founded Books & Brews, the organising community that brings together a community of interested people for lovingly curated, live, intimate sessions around books, reading, and the love for words.

As if stocking up on volumes old and new isn't enough, this Sunday's session will see writers Roopa Pai and Shweta Taneja speak about the need to cultivate a healthy culture of bookstores while speaking about their books. “It promises to be a treat for everyone — old Bengalureans will love the nostalgia, new ones the very special introduction to what has always been one of the city's biggest and best open secrets — its fabulous bookstores. I love the fact that we are going to be tripping through the streets at 11 am in high summer, when the rest of the country is hiding indoors, or wishing it could be,” quips Roopa.

Wait, there's more! Aparna Athreya of Bangalore Storytelling Society will employ puppets to tell stories. Illustrators Jai Jain, Natalia Rebecca Issac, Swadha Jaiswal and Khushnaz Lala will live sketch participants in the bookstores as they flip through pages and wander through book shelves. There will be music too - Vasudhaiva Ride with their saxophone and percussion and harmonicist Siddharth Suresh's tunes. You'll also get to parley with owners on their journey from the time they started, to how they've survived in the age of Kindles.

Bookstore owners are not only excited to share their journeys but think that this is a great concept. “What this does is connect completely random people who are only connected through their love for books. This is especially relevant in a city like Bengaluru that has a floating population. What better way to meet new people and get acquainted to book stores around you?” says Ravi Menezes, owner of Goobe's Book Republic on Church Street, who believes that this concept should come alive every weekend.  Want to celebrate the reading culture while supporting local book stores in the city? Take a page from this book crawl.