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Not sure why we didn’t cotton on to this sooner, but Maud Newton’s running a fantastic of articles on independent bookstores this month.

So far, she’s had:

write on Burke’s Book Store in Memphis, TN;

on DC’s Books for America;

on D.C.ÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s Kramerbooks and Afterwords;

on AlbanyÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s Dove & Hudson;

on San FranciscoÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s Green Apple Books;

on BloomingtonÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s Caveat Emptor;

and on San FranciscoÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s Adobe Books.

My personal favorite so far is , also on DC’s Books for America, which begins

Among its many other well-documented disappointments, Washington is badly fixed for good bookstores. The cityÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s permanent standing army of wonks and think tankers either feast on free review copies or do their grimly efficient intellectual trading at the standard B and N or Borders outposts. And that means that stores that traffic in literary-cum-indie fare are either too embattled (e.g., the well-meaning but erratically stocked Chapters, in downtownÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s revived Penn Plaza neighborhood), too self-satisfied (the outer Northwest depot of bien-pensant reading, Politics and Prose, which does for written smugness what NPR does for the broadcast audio kind), or too fraudulent (the overhyped Kramerbooks and Afterwords in DuPont, pretty much a Yuppie pick-up venue decorated haphazardly with Times bestsellers) to satisfy hard-core browsers.