On April 4 and 5, we celebrated the third-annual Austin Texas Book Trail — a self-guided bookstore crawl with perks and programming at a record-high 36 independent bookshops across the city. With the welcoming of seven new shops to the Austin area, this year’s trail was a major feat for those who wanted to visit the entire map (a feat accomplished by 4 diehard trailgoers!).
Keep reading for a recap of this year’s events and a few takeaways.
Day One: Saturday, April 4
We started off the weekend the same way we do every year — with our Morning Kickoff at Mañana Coffee (now Mattina Coffee) in downtown Austin. Mañana kindly provided free drip coffee for trailgoers as they picked up their trail maps, met up with friends and fellow bookshoppers, and got first dibs on our exclusive 2026 merch.
Free coffee and breakfast tacos from Mañana.
This year’s trail map! We handed out over 400 at the morning kickoff alone.
This year’s merch included embroidered dad caps (printed by local shop Goody Bag) and our official poster with artwork by local illustrator Wavy Roller, or Victoria Cardeñas. After the trail weekend, participants also had an opportunity to enter a raffle for a handmade beaded flower by local artist Meant to Bead.
Trailgoers picked up free bus and bike passes thanks to our partnership with CapMetro, Austin’s official public transportation provider.
The morning’s events were soundtracked by DJ Veneer of the Queer Vinyl Collective.
We collected several boxes of gently used books to donate to Lioness Books, a bookstore on the trail who faced a devastating fire the week before and lost most of their inventory.
Mañana donated a portion of their seasonal latte sales from the morning to Inside Books Project.
Despite the gloomy weather, we saw a record number of folks at the kickoff and loved getting a chance to see new and returning faces as we ushered in Year 3 of the Book Trail!
Day Two: Sunday, April 5
After a weekend of bookshop-hopping, we hosted a sweet little afterparty at Strangelove Coffee & Wine over in East Austin.
This year’s afterparty included a special menu by food popup Good Jinn, an Alice in Wonderland themed drink special at the bar, and book stack sketches by local artists Ashley Robin Franklin and Sammy Ness.
Ashley Robin Franklin drawing book stack sketches.
Guests with their Book Trail specialty drink: the Golden Afternoon, a sparkling wine cocktail with lemongrass syrup and an herb garnish.
Dishes by Good Jinn, wine from Strangelove, hat by us.
A moment for the HEB sheet cake with our 2026 poster printed on it.
View all photos from the weekend here.
What we’ve learned from Year 3…
New bookstores continue to open and find their niche in the Austin literary scene.
This year’s trail welcomed a whopping seven (!) new bookstores: TOMO mags, Finney’s Books, Stop & Read Books in Austin; The Secret Lantern and Phat Tracks Books & Records in Cedar Park; Adventures in Ink in Leander; and Green Heron Bookshop in San Marcos. And each opened with a specific community in mind — design & art, romance, litfic & cookbooks, scifi & fantasy, comics, used books. The bookstore boom is happening and doesn’t look like it’s going to stop anytime soon.
Explore our directory of Austin bookstores here.
Music and literature go hand in hand.
Each year we try to do something a little different with our partnerships and promotions, and this year’s was with music — through the form of a collaborative playlist, the Trail Mix (ha, get it). We asked 18 artists & orgs in town that we know and admire to submit a song to accompany trailgoers as they visited bookstores. The result was an eclectic, multi-genre mix of songs that we loved listening to during our weekend!
Listen to the Trail Mix here.
We’re becoming an annual tradition for some trailgoers.
With each year of putting on the Book Trail, we’re finding our people. This year’s stats showed 67% of trailgoers participating for the first time, compared to last year’s 77%. At one of the bookstores we visited, we met two sisters from Seattle who had planned their annual trip to visit each other around the Book Trail after enjoying it so much the year before!
As a self-funded, two-woman project that’s fueled primarily by our love of bookstores and the literary community in Austin, stories like these are what motivate us to keep it going year after year. We can’t wait to see y’all again in Year 4 as we welcome even more new shops to the bookstore microcosm of Austin!