2025 North Portland Book Crawl Recap
Every year, the publishing world celebrates the small guys: independent bookstores. This year, on Saturday, April 26, even Penguin Random House posted in support of the bookstores that, in my opinion, make our world shine. Portland is packed with independent bookstores of all niches and gimmicks and styles, and for the weekend, a group of ten bookstore owners from St. Johns to the Alberta District hosted a bookstore crawl. I had the pleasure of attending the festivities with my partner! Here is what we did.
We started midmorning on Saturday. I drove to pick my partner up and we decided that, while we wanted coffee ASAP, we’d wait until we were over the bridge to get some and support another small business. Going over the St. Johns Bridge is always a little horrifying for me; it’s way too up in the air and the lanes are too small. It did only take about one to two minutes to cross, but that’s not the point. Once we had crossed, we stopped at Two Stroke Coffee, which had a kind of cool vibe and amazing coffee!
Around the corner was our first bookstore stop, Two Rivers Bookstore. The owner, Christine Longmuir, is a wonderful person who focuses on supporting small businesses and shares her shop with Weird Sisters, a yarn store. We received a warm welcome, a sticker, and our punchcard with all of the participating bookstores, and we were sent straight to the 20 percent off table that had some neat picks. I couldn’t help myself and bought a copy of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, as I am currently trying to start the Hunger Games series for the first time ever.
From there we went to Revolutions Bookshop just down the street, and I purchased an original cover copy of Queen of Shadows for about nine dollars. I have not been able to stop looking at it. This book is part of the famous YA series, Throne of Glass (or TOG for the fandom), written by Sarah J. Maas. They were reprinted almost two years ago due to the spike in popularity while her other series, ACOTAR, was hot. All this to say, an original cover is hard to find these days.
The crawl showcased some bookstores that were pretty niche and specialized. Parallel Worlds Bookshop was definitely my partner's favorite. It’s a small corner store on Alberta Street that specializes in sci-fi and fantasy; it’s basically wall-to-wall with the likes of Brandon Sanderson, Tolkien, and one-off books from the ’80s. The line to get in had us curious why this shop was so popular, and once we got in we saw the reason. I did buy a copy of The Once and Future King and Howl's Moving Castle. We will be back!
Midslumber Media was small but carried both books and movies. Their theme? Horror. While I appreciated and loved the atmosphere and the shoutout to my Over the Garden Wall tattoo, we didn’t buy anything there.
One of my favorites, just for the nostalgia of it all, was Reggie’s Manga Shop. It’s part manga bookstore, part cafe that carries Japanese convenience snacks like onigiri, ramen, and sandos. By the time we hit this shop, I was starving, and I love a tuna mayo onigiri snack. While we snacked we looked around and ended up watching some of the ’90s movie Sailor Moon SuperS on one of their TVs. All I could hear next to me was my partner saying, “Tuxedo Mask is so cool.” I will die on the hill that he is not.
We hit two more bookstores after that, Arches and Melville Books. Both of these stores were lowkey and had Pinterest-photo-worthy interiors. We walked around each shop for a bit but couldn’t make heads or tails of what section was what. I like a good, messy bookstore, but I also really love organization.
Our last stop was Green Bean Books. If you’re from Portland and you followed this navigation loop: yes, we were all over the place and didn’t realize that we had passed Green Bean. But we made our way there eventually, and I really loved it. To the tune of “Kokomo” over the speakers, I walked around and picked out books for my nieces and a close friend's newborn. Of course, one of them was Frog and Toad. Another was a book about colors in Spanish, and I happened upon a Beatrix Potter lookalike. It’s sitting on my couch wrapped so I don’t know the name, but I remember that it had the same feel of a Peter Rabbit book, except instead of rabbits, it had mice.
After a full day of spending money that I really should not have spent, I came out with a total of eight books (one was a freebie) and a bank account that has about a hundred dollars less. It was an amazing day, and while I didn’t do the full book crawl, I’d definitely go back next year if they do it again. Portland is a city where small and independent businesses, especially literary ones, can thrive, and Hellebore supports buying local! ✿
