Love Your Bookshop Day is always a highlight for Tough Guy Book Club, but 2026 was something special. For the first time, the Australian Booksellers Association invited TGBC to get involved officially, making every member of the club an ambassador for the day.
And we got amongst it by doing what we do best, organising groups of guys for events that push our goal of getting guys to read more, talk more, and have more friends. On LYBD26, TGBC Chapters hosted more than 100 events across towns and cities around Australia. Members organised bookshop crawls, visited independent booksellers, and introduced new readers to stores they may never have discovered otherwise. The day wasn't just limited to Australia. TGBC's international Chapters got involved as well, showing the same support for local bookshops in their own communities around the world.
If you went into a bookshop that day you would have likely found huge groups of men in black t-shirts hunting for their next read, or enlarging their TBR pile and asking the booksellers for recommendations to shake up their shelves. As an added layer to the events, TGBC CEO Shay Leighton challenged the fathers, step-fathers, cool uncles, godfathers, foster parents, guardians, grandfathers, or any other sort of adult who cares for young men, to bring them along on this day. To show them how a bookshop works, that they are awesome, and that men of all shapes and sizes belong in them.
The reaction was immense. The amount of positive feedback we received across all events, in person from booksellers, on line as people following along, and among the Goons themselves was incredible to see.
One comment in particular captured exactly why we do this “Mum to a 9yo son.. It was sooo good to walk into the bookshop today and see a group of men in the bookshop discussing books and what they loved reading!!! So good.” That right there. That’s why we bloody do it!
As the day wrapped up, Goons compared purchases, some grabbed meals together, swapped recommendations online, or raced home to start reading. If Love Your Bookshop Day 2026 proved anything, it's that men love reading, men love bookshops, and we love to bring others along for the journey.
By Desmond Doyle
