It’s the personal touch: bookshop customer experiences
On the eve of Love your Bookshop Day, we asked three booksellers about how their daily exchanges with customers delivered a mutually beneficial experience.
Follow your heart to your local bookshop on Saturday 8 October 2022.
One of the joys of visiting or ordering from brick-and-mortar bookshops is the serendipitous, unexpected and often gratifying relationships fostered between booksellers and their customers, relationships that are denied those who deal with faceless monoliths like Amazon.
To mark Love your Bookshop Day (8 October), ArtsHub asked three booksellers to offer us anecdotal stories of how personal connections have been wrought through their daily interactions.
Thuy On is the Reviews and Literary Editor of ArtsHub and an arts journalist, critic and poet who’s written for a range of publications including The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books, The Australian, The Age/SMH and Australian Book Review. She was the Books Editor of The Big Issue for 8 years and a former Melbourne theatre critic correspondent for The Australian.
She has three collections of poetry published by the University of Western Australian Press (UWAP): Turbulence (2020), Decadence (2022) and Essence (2025).
Threads: @thuy_on123 Instagram: poemsbythuy
