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.

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.

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Thuy On is Reviews 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. Her debut, a collection of poetry called Turbulence, came out in 2020 and was released by University of Western Australia Publishing (UWAP). Her second collection, Decadence, was published in July 2022, also by UWAP. Her third book, Essence, will be published in 2025. Twitter: @thuy_on Instagram: poemsbythuy