In this blog post, Higher Education Innovation Fellow Dr. Susana Sanchez-Gonzalez explores ‘bookishness’ in light of the National Year of Reading 2026. 

Here is a thought: What if reading were the least important thing we did with books?

Bear with me…

As HE Innovation Fellow, I work closely with Manchester UNESCO City of Literature, exploring how my research on bookishness can inform their activity, particularly during the Festival of Libraries. With the National Year of Reading underway, I have been invited to reflect on how my work could also support reading for pleasure. What follows is a personal take on how thinking about our emotional relationships with the physical book might help reframe the conversation.

Being Bookish

My research explores to what extent bookish emotions (the experiences we live in, with, and around books) influences what people see and feel in book exhibitions. [1] I am interested in what happens when books are encountered not as texts to be read, but as objects to look at and engage with from a distance. To explore this, I spoke to people who described themselves as “bookish”, asking what they did when books were around and what books did to them in return. What emerged was surprisingly consistent. Being bookish was rarely about how much or how well people read, nor about status or expertise. Instead, bookishness emerged as a pattern of everyday practices shaped by the meanings and feelings that books carried for them as objects.

More than Reading

For most bookish people, reading for pleasure was an important part of this picture, but only one part. They liked having books nearby even when not reading. They felt calmer or more focused in book-filled spaces. They browsed libraries and bookshops without a plan. They owned more books than they could ever read, and they were perfectly fine about it (no, bookish people have not read all the books on their shelves). Bookish people took pleasure in covers, typography, illustrations, bindings and layout. They spoke about the feel, weight and smell of books. They linked books with comfort, routine, escape or difficult moments they had lived through. When they talked about what they read, there was no hierarchy: comics, children’s books, literary fiction and non-fiction all sat side by side. What mattered was not so much the text inside them, but the stories and histories that gather around them.

Bookishness

This heightened attention to the physical book is not only personal; it reflects a wider cultural shift. Scholars such as Jessica Pressman describe this as part of the contemporary phenomenon of bookishness: a renewed attention to the material book at the very moment of its alleged obsolescence as a medium for reading. [2] As text becomes everywhere and nowhere at once, the physical book gains new significance as a form of identity-building and self-expression (hence the choice to wear book-shaped earrings or carry tote bags printed with favourite book covers).

Bookishness also extends beyond the page or the shelf. Online spaces, especially among younger people, are full of bookish activity. TikTok and Instagram feature recommendations, rituals, shelves, and images of libraries, bookshops and cosy reading corners. Research into these communities shows they create inclusive spaces where attachment to books can be expressed without needing to demonstrate literary authority. [3] Enthusiasm and identification are foregrounded over expertise or completion. Reading here is social, visual, aesthetic and emotionally expressive, which raises another interesting question: why does bookishness feel easy to claim in some spaces, yet harder to admit to in others?

Taken together, these ideas invite us to look again at what we are trying to achieve. We know that reading for pleasure is not about targets or totals. It is about something else, but we often forget that this else includes the associations and emotions that grow slowly from repeated visual, tactile, social and emotional encounters with books. Essentially, we become Readers (with a capital R) when a moment makes a book feel worth keeping close and returning to. When that magic happens, we become what Catalans describe with the beautiful term lletraferit (literally, “wounded by letters”). Carrying this condition makes us part of an emotional community which accompanies us through life, and that, too, is an outcome worth shouting about.

So what does this means for libraries during the National Year of Reading?

Libraries could lean into bookishness by treating books not only as resources to be read and borrowed, but also as a particular kind of object. This means paying closer attention to the sensorial qualities of library spaces and curating shelves in more intentionally bookish ways — not as decoration, but as a strategy for building emotional connection. Drawing on bookish people to help bring reluctant readers closer to books may seem counterintuitive at first, yet I offer it here as a practical way of understanding how attachment begins and how this knowledge might inform and enhance both new and existing approaches. Bookish attachments grow through repetition, familiarity and social interaction, and libraries are uniquely placed to nurture these beginnings.

This approach could shape programming too. Events might foreground time spent with books: noticing covers, illustrations, typography or signs of wear before reading even begins. Guided browsing with simple prompts, choosing books for one another based on visual appeal (yes, we do judge books by their covers), or creating object-based conversations that invite people to share what draws them in offer simple ways of bringing bookish encounters to the centre of the experience.

Seen this way, the National Year of Reading is not only about encouraging people to read more. It is about recognising that reading often emerges from everything that happens around the book. And that is perhaps my point: reading may be what brings us to books, but it is rarely the most important thing we do with them.

Footnotes

[1] To know more about this research, my doctoral thesis, Hooked by the Book: Bookish Emotions and Book Exhibition Experience, is publicly available here.

[2] Pressman, J. (2020). Bookishness: Loving books in a digital age. Columbia University Press.

[3] Rodger, N. (2019). From bookshelf porn and shelfies to #bookfacefriday: How readers use Pinterest to promote their bookishness. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 16(1).