Introducing the Philadelphia Bookstore Map. You’re going to want to grab one — fast.

Philly, our bookstore owners have put themselves on the map — the official Philadelphia Bookstore Map.

And what a story it tells — of imagination, of perseverance, and of community.

The project, more than 15 years in the making, was unveiled this week at the Parkway Central Branch of the Free Library to an enthusiastic audience of book lovers. “Who wouldn’t want this?” gushed Gina Dawson, of Partners and Son, an indie comic shop and art gallery on South Sixth Street.

Who wouldn’t, indeed. But get them while you can. There are 50,000 free maps available in libraries, bookstores, cafes, visitors’ centers, and other hubs around the city (minus the two or three I snagged for myself).

The idea for the map began with Molly Russakoff, a third-generation bookseller who runs Molly’s Books & Records near Ninth Street and Washington Avenue with her husband, Joe Ankenbrand, and her son, John Dickie.

Russakoff, who has no shortage of thoughts about building a strong sense of community through books, had long believed that a map could draw customers and attention to the city’s eclectic brick-and-mortar bookstores.

After years of trying to get the project going, a grassroots fundraising campaign supported by a 2022 grant from the city’s Commerce Department helped get it off the ground. The project also received a distinctive flourish from a local painter.

Henry Crane created watercolors of 46 storefronts, including Straight from the Heart Bookstore, a Christian shop in Somerton, Hakim’s Bookstore, the city’s oldest Black-owned bookstore in West Philly, Port Richmond’s Ontario Street Comics, where scenes for M. Night Shyamalan’s movies Unbreakable and Glass were filmed, and my neighborhood favorite, booked., a woman-owned shop in Chestnut Hill.

The map paints a robust picture of “a good, strong community of booksellers,” Russakoff said.

“It shows the world that we have a vibrant bookstore community, which in turn says that we have a vibrant reader community — which also says that we have a very educated community and that Philadelphia really is a world-class intellectual center of the arts,” said Curtis Kise, a key member of the effort and the owner of Neighborhood Books, a used bookstore in Center City.

Still, Russakoff said, the map underscores how some parts of the book-buying market remain untapped — and something I noticed, how huge sections of the city are without a bookstore. (I love all of the Little Free Libraries that have popped up all over our city, including my own, but there is nothing quite like walking into a neighborhood bookstore.)

Russakoff said young readers would benefit from a store that specialized in children’s books. And in an especially inspired idea — a Spanish-language bookstore near her store in the iconic Italian Market, which has been transformed in recent years by newly arrived Mexican migrants.

“A lot of seeds have been planted,” she said. And Russakoff isn’t just content to sit and watch them grow. She’s already envisioning additional printings of the map. It would be great to update it as stores inevitably open, close, and even move — a few shops did that during the creation of the map. There’s talk of a digitized version, so be on the lookout for that.

At the bookstore map launch Wednesday afternoon, Crane, the artist whose paintings helped jump-start the effort last year, got a laugh when he told those gathered about someone who said, as a compliment, that it was a miracle the project was finished.

But Crane didn’t agree.

“To me,” he said, “this is something that so many people wanted to come into the world that it only makes sense that it finally did.”