Tartu bookshop celebrates five years of community and curated books

Biblioteek, an independent bookshop in Tartu, is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week, ERR’s Klassikaraadio reported. Owner Kristel Kalda said the shop’s key strengths are its carefully selected books and community activities.

About half of the shop’s visitors are familiar faces, and staff often know regular customers by name and understand their reading preferences.

“From the very beginning, when we established the shop, we started building up a base of regular customers. Today I can proudly say that we have more than 1,000 regular customers, which may not be so few for a small independent bookshop in Tartu,” Kalda said on the programme Delta.

She said more than half of the recipients open the shop’s newsletter, describing this as one of several small details showing how loyal the bookshop’s visitors and friends are.

Kalda considers the ability to recommend books personally one of the advantages of a small independent bookshop. The staff know many customers’ reading tastes and can make recommendations based on their previous preferences.

“We listen to their preferences and keywords, and based on that we can recommend a good reading experience,” she said.

Biblioteek’s customers range from children to elderly people. The shop’s oldest regular customer is 91-year-old Maie, who lives nearby. The shop also celebrated her 90th birthday there. Many of the younger customers are children, for whom the shop offers reading passports.

The shop’s location at Aparaaditehas, near the Pauluse bus stop, also brings in occasional visitors. A glass wall separates the shop from the street and bus stop, and people sometimes enter while waiting for a bus. The shop also attracts many tourists in summer, offering translations of Estonian literature as well as postcards and T-shirts with literary designs.

“In general, occasional visitors are not daily visitors. We often see people who have already come once and realised that this is the shop where they want to spend their money,” Kalda said. She added that customers particularly appreciate the shop’s curated selection of books.

The idea for Biblioteek began in a literary city

Kalda did not work in literature before establishing Biblioteek. She was employed by Tartu’s cultural administration and was involved in the process through which Tartu sought to become a UNESCO City of Literature. Tartu received the title in 2015.

While visiting cities of literature around the world, Kalda saw small independent bookshops and began thinking that Tartu could have one too. To establish her shop, she took part in the Tartu Creative Economy Centre’s incubation programme and also raised money through Hooandja. Nearly 200 people supported the shop’s launch through the platform.

Poet Joosep Vesselov soon joined the Biblioteek team and remains involved with the shop. Kalda said running a small independent bookshop requires the owner to be present much of the time, as fully delegating its operation to other employees is not financially viable and would undermine the purpose of the business.

In its fifth year of operation, Biblioteek also began publishing books. Its first publication was an Estonian translation of Your Further, a poetry collection by Dutch architect and poet Klaske Havik.

Havik has been connected with Estonia since the 1990s. She has frequently visited Estonia and Finland, collaborated with the Estonian Academy of Arts and written about the development of Estonia’s urban space.

Biblioteek’s community role is also important to Kalda. The shop hosts a book club once a month and organises various events for children and adults.

“People want to communicate and share their reading experiences. They can do all of that here in this small shop,” she said.