These New York City Book Crawls Were Made for Walking

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One of Jennifer Harlan’s favorite ways to get to know a place is by wandering through its local independent bookstores.

So when Ms. Harlan, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, was brainstorming with a group of fellow editors this year about how to show off New York City’s literary scene, she and the team landed on the idea of a series of bookstore crawls through the city’s neighborhoods.

“We were thinking both about bookstores we loved in our own neighborhoods, as well as ones in other parts of the city we wanted to show off,” she said.

The guide to the first crawl, through Midtown Manhattan, was published in July, followed by one through Prospect Heights and Park Slope in Brooklyn last month.

The idea, Ms. Harlan said, was to cultivate an itinerary that would not only have variety — comics, used books, romance, drama — but that would also hit both must-visit highlights and lesser-known gems, like the fantasy-themed Love & Legends.

In an interview, she discussed the criteria that make the perfect bookstore, how editors narrowed down the contenders and her dream book crawl. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.