Indie Bookstore Day is this weekend, and Tampa Bay needs more of them

Indie Bookstore Day happens this weekend, and in the spirit of a recent Creative Loafing Tampa Bay poll that asked what the area needs to be a better place in four years, I’m calling for more more indie bookstores, more little free libraries and louder literacy advocates.

There are more than a dozen local bookstores in the area, and even more that are worth the drive to Polk, Pasco and Sarasota counties. They range from historic, family-owned shops (Wilson’s Book World) and one-room community hubs (Portkey Books) to elegant and multifaceted (Oxford Exchange) and inclusive spaces for authors and readers (Tombolo Books).

And while the beloved Haslam’s Bookstore in St. Petersburg remains closed since March 2020, locals like me still hold out hope the historic institution will reopen some day. Please?
I challenge the Tampa Bay area to have at least one bookstore in each city in the next four years. Tampa and St. Petersburg, you’re good. Clearwater, Seminole, Plant City, Temple Terrace—it’s time to step up.

There are also dozens of public libraries and well over a hundred little free libraries just in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties—all of them offering free access to books and other reading material.

But as a region with more than three million people, there’s plenty of room for more.

Hell, the city with the most bookstores in the world is Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, with 41.9 bookstores per 100,000 people. Lisbon’s population? Just over 3 million.

We’re also being outdone in our own state when it comes to little free libraries. The city of Lake Worth Beach, population around 43,000, was recognized in 2019 for having the most little free libraries per capita. At the time, the city had more than 120.

Surely, the Tampa Bay area could have more.

Having lots of indie bookstores and little free libraries doesn’t just show support for local businesses and the community. They’re also a marker for an area that recognizes and prioritizes literacy and access to books.

Book bans and challenges, especially in Florida, aren’t new. But over the last year there’s been a dramatic increase in challenges to reading material in the state’s public schools under the guise of keeping “obscene” stories out of children’s hands.

What’s happened since Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the HB 1069 into law is books being pulled from shelves for review. Many of those books are written by LGBTQ authors and authors of color and feature stories about racism, gender and sexuality—wrongly deemed sexual content by conservative groups like Moms for Liberty.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the Florida-based Moms for Liberty as a far-right extremist group. The coalition formed in early 2021 and has since grown to nearly 300 chapters across 46 states, working to challenge and remove books and instructional material containing anything they think is inappropriate. It still backs candidates running for local office in every corner of the Sunshine State.

While groups like Moms for Liberty seem the loudest, literacy advocates in the Tampa Bay area and Florida need to be louder.

We need to be louder at school board meetings where these groups overwhelm the citizen comment portion. We need to open more little free libraries and local bookstores—filling them with essential, diverse reads. We need to patronize those libraries and stores by sharing books, buying them and participating in community book events.

And we need to vote for political candidates who support access to books for all ages and are vehemently against book banning and censorship.

All of this would make the Tampa Bay area a better—and more well-read—place to live.
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