Mark Rubbo, director of the seven branches of Readings bookshops in Melbourne, Australia, tells me they’ve been selling canvas bags emblazoned with the image of the original bookshop’s façade for over twenty years, but that it was only in 2016 they adopted the slogan “Shop local. Love your community,” because “that was when Amazon came to Australia.”
Nobody would think of walking through Melbourne with an Amazon T-shirt, whereas Readings bags are very visible in the centre of this cosmopolitan city. In recent years, the readers most aware of this new paradigm have made bookshops part of their identity. Bookshops are now wearable, photogenic, and sexy.
The global crisis coincided with the explosion of digital media that have made “best of” lists viral. Pinterest and Instagram (both launched in 2010) have popularized bookporn. Although the net is full of lists of the most beautiful, most famous, most important bookshops in the world, the truth is that the canon it has imposed lacks rigour, with each list copying another, and where the only criteria are a shop’s previous number of citations and how photogenic they are.
Starting in 2016, however, more serious criteria have emerged for determining the planet’s key bookshops. I am referring to the London Book Fair’s Bookstore of the Year Award.
“I wasn’t in London, but a couple of colleagues from the bookshop did go to the ceremony where the winner was announced,” Rubbo tells me. They called him in the early hours: “It was the most exciting moment in my entire professional career.” Readings had been chosen as the world’s best bookshop.
What’s more, Readings hadn’t put itself forward with photos or numbers of followers on social media, but rather with data about their thirty-five years of activity, supporting local writers (through frequent book launches and a scholarship programme with the neighbouring Wheeler Centre), and working with the city (Readings Kids, Readings’s beautiful children’s and YA speciality shop, features a jungle mural by children’s book illustrator Marc Martin that invites young patrons to come in and get lost).
Shakespeare and Company was awarded the prize in 2017. And in 2018 the distinction went to The English Bookshop in the legendary Swedish city of Uppsala. If we add the seven runners-up to those three, we would possibly have a list of the ten best bookshops in the world: Hoepli (Italy), Rahva Raamat (Estonia), Sanlian Bookhouse (China), Exclusive Books (South Africa), Time Out Bookstore (New Zealand), Ca˘rtures¸ti Carusel (Romania), and Timbooktoo (Gambia). However, at least two issues make this list questionable. On the one hand, the fact that all three prize winners sell books in English. On the other, that not a single shop from the Hispanic world figures in the list. Even so, it is undoubtedly the most reliable selection we have at the moment.
“That recognition had wide coverage in the media,” Rubbo says. But, although tourists from other Australian cities or even from Europe drop in now and then, attracted by the prize, “what’s crucial to us is that, ever since, the bookshop has been held in even higher esteem by our own customers.”
Photos of Readings may not have gone viral online—on websites, Pinterest, or Instagram. But images of their books, launches, and booksellers have certainly gone viral in the minds of Melbourne’s readers. And that’s what really matters.