The next book that I finished yesterday was Bookstore Tourism: The Book Addict's Guide to Planning & Promoting Bookstore Road Trips for Bibliophiles & Other Bookshop Junkies by Larry Portzline. It was short, and was pressing people to arrange group tours of independent bookstores wherever they might be found. Not a bad sentiment, IMHO.
The story is as follows: Many years ago, before the Internet was noticed by the public at large, there were BBSs. I had been invited to participate in a particular BBS in Orange County, CA, and I was enthralled by the digital conversations there. One day, a woman complained about the quality of her local used bookstore, and I responded that my own neighborhood boasted several, as it was close to Whittier College.
From that developed what we called "Bookstore Blitz", an event where an area with several used or specialty new bookstores would be descended upon by the BBS crowd in an unusual outing for folks who normally didn't get out much. It would include a lunch, usually of some Third World cuisine. They were great fun, and probably generated hundreds of dollars of sales for the stores.
We did this at least five times in three years, but time caught up with us, and we couldn't get it together.
The above book reminds me very much of those days, and how much we enjoyed ourselves.
It just might be something for folks in this discussion group to consider, maybe...