Celebrate Love Your Bookshop Day to help your local cave of wonders

When it comes to bookstores, Australians are spoilt for choice. According to the Australian Booksellers Association (ABA), Melbourne ranked second only to Argentina in July 2021 as having the most bookshops per capita* in the world. ABA CEO Robbie Egan called our book retailing sector “world class”.

Indeed, national Love Your Bookshop Day lands on Saturday 8 October - and with further downpours predicted for Australia's eastern seaboard, it is the ideal weekend to stay safe and settled in your most comfortable chair, reading a brilliant book.

“With bookshops from Margaret River to North Tamborine, Burnie to Broken Hill, Kerang to Alice Springs, whether it’s regional or in our major cities, bookshops across Australia do the heavy lifting in creating awareness and buzz around our wonderful local authors as well as the best in writing from across the globe,” Mr Egan said.

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Metropolitan* bookshops were “bouncing back after the ravages* of Covid-19 lockdowns”, Mr Egan said, but these safe houses of human stories were certainly hit hard. Readers were denied countless community events and both debut* and established authors lost their all-important book launches in cosy local bookstores around the country.

So here at Kids News we are getting our booklover on and celebrating our incredible homegrown writers, editors, designers, publishers, booksellers – as well as the other true believers who adore books, bookstores and reading just as much as we do.

Author of the Funny Kid and Bored series, Matt Stanton called his bookstore browsing, “the hunt for interesting stories.”

“An understated part of the pleasure of reading is the joy of searching for and selecting a new book,” Stanton said. “My local bookstore is a place overflowing with interesting stories. It draws me in, overwhelms my senses and I emerge much later with a richer, calmer soul.”

The word “local” is used loosely by renowned* children’s author Jackie French, who travels some distance to reach hers.

“My ‘local’ bookshop is 100 km away, the bookshop at the heart of the nation, the National Library bookshop in Canberra,” said the beloved author of Australian classic Diary of a Wombat. “A book can change a life. A book can change the world – and every time I enter that bookshop ‘just to look around’, a book I never guessed existed grabs me, and in some small way or large I am never quite the same again.”

Naming a series The Travelling Bookshop is a bit of a giveaway from author Katrina Nannestad about where her loyalties lie.

“My local bookshop is a treasure trove* of beautiful books curated* by smart, passionate people,” she said. “It’s a gathering place for booklovers and a wonderful escape from the rest of the world.”

And if you’re the sort of reader who seeks out the haunted corners of old bookstores, the unusually titled debut A Girl Called Corpse may be one for you this weekend.

For readers aged 8-12, it tells the story of Corpse, a ghost who cannot remember her name or her life on Earth.

“She’s a ghost – but really she’s a kid,” said first-time author Reece Carter.

Growing up loving stories like Roald Dahl’s The Witches and Paul Jennings’ Round the Twist, Carter said he didn’t write a frightening story just for the sake of being scary.

“It was more so that I could write a story about showing kids a hero who experiences scary stuff and makes it through to the other side,” he said.

In everyone’s life, he said, “scary stuff happens, but yeah, you’ll get through to the other side.”

As a heroine*, little Corpse is clever and has some magic of her own, which she has been learning while hiding from horrible witches.

She also has some good friends, including a spider called Simon.

Creating a friendly arachnid* wasn’t hard for the writer, who doesn’t fear spiders at all. Carter grew up on a farm in Western Australia and always found the big huntsman spiders comforting.

“They are there in the morning, they don’t do much, and they are still there when you get home in the evening,” he said. “They are just these big, docile* spiders. Simon the huntsman acts like a shrunken version of my dog.”

The villains in the story are a vicious lady merchant, and the witches, who are all men with some nasty characteristics. One of them has breath that smells like “dead mice and vinegar” – warning enough that Corpse should keep her distance.

Luckily, she has a special superpower: the magical ability to love, and to nurture the special friendships that kids have. Friendships that might just start in your local bookstore.

Your family can get involved in Love Your Bookshop Day on Saturday 8 October by sharing and tagging your local bookshop on social and sharing the love: #loveyourbookshopday #LYBD2022

GLOSSARY

• per capita: for each person, per head or per unit of population
• metropolitan: relating to a large city or metropolis
• ravages: great damage or difficulty brought to someone or something
• debut: created or done for the first time
• renowned: widely known, acclaimed and honoured
• trove: a valuable collection or store of delightful things
• curated: carefully chosen and cared for as part of a collection
• heroine: the main female character in a book, as in the male “hero”
• arachnid: wingless, carnivorous anthropod with four pairs of legs, like spiders and scorpions
• docile: passive, quiet, easy to control

EXTRA READING

David Walliams visits Kids News

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QUICK QUIZ

1. When is Love Your Bookshop Day this year?
2. Which Australian city ranked second in the world for most bookstores per capita in 2021?
3. How far does author Jackie French live from her local bookstore and which one is it?
4. Matt Stanton is the author of which two popular children’s series?
5. Why isn’t debut author Reece Carter afraid of spiders?

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CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
1. Design a poster
Design a poster. The purpose of your poster is to let other kids know about Love Your Bookshop Day and understand what’s so great about bookshops!

Time: allow 30 minutes to complete this activity
Curriculum Links: English; Visual Communication Design

2. Extension
Write a story. Your story is set, or happens in, a haunted corner of your local bookshop.

Time: allow 10 minutes to complete this activity
Curriculum Links: English

VCOP ACTIVITY
Imaginative dialogue
Imagine you were there during the event being discussed in the article, or for the interview.

Create a conversation between two characters from the article – you may need or want to include yourself as one of the characters. Don’t forget to try to use facts and details from the article to help make your dialogue as realistic as possible.

Go through your writing and highlight any punctuation you have used in green. Make sure you carefully check the punctuation used for the dialogue and ensure you have opened and closed the speaking in the correct places.