Texas Monthly has a lively, interactive map feature on its website that tours you through the leading indie bookstores across Texas. If you’re a daytripper (and you ought to be, in the fall and springtime months), the stores on the map serve as fascinating destinations for your travels.
Not far from Austin, Belton has The Blackbird Books & Spirits. The owners call it a bookstore speakeasy, the world’s only store that you enter by sliding aside a gilt-framed, life-size portrait of Ma Ferguson (the Bell County native who succeeded her husband to take hold of the governor’s post in the 1920s. You know, speakeasy time.) There’s also stores on the map in Boerne, Bastrop, and even tiny Clifton northwest of Waco.
If you’re fond of taking what LBJ used to call “a Sunday drive with Molly and the babies,” the map will become a resource you can bookmark for your phone. Send me your reports on anything you visit. Indie stores are where indie books are sold. Lots of books have a better chance of being an indie book, even the ones authors publish themselves.
