Steal My Crawl: Beth Fileti
Need ideas for your crawl? We asked some folks to share how they participated last year, or what they’d like to do this year. Take inspiration or copy them outright–we won’t tell!
Beth Fileti, artist
Beth is an artist, writer, educator living in Caldwell NJ.
Beth’s 2025 Crawl
We had a whiteboard in our first apartment. (Stay with me here. It’s related.) In our postage stamp of a kitchen, it took up all the wall space. Every week, we’d slowly list peanut butter, paper towels, parmesean [sic], cucumber—all the small things that kept our family of three going.
We were young(ish) parents in the 2010s with iPhones. So rather than bring a grocery list to the store, we’d take a pic of this whiteboard. Which means I have a small digital archive of grocery lists. And my daughter’s food requests, spelling mistakes, and handwriting.
My favorite of these is a picture of one item, added by my daughter to our whiteboard of groceries. It reads, “Please more books.”
It’s perfect. A perfect phrase. It’s so wide open. Literally any book checks it off the list. Because even a terrible book, like, it’s still a book. And that alone means something.
You can’t predict what a book is going to do once it enters your home. There are books that have changed my life (The Four Million, O’Henry) and there are books that I hid under a radiator after a couple chapters (IT, Stephen King). Books have bored me, built me, buried me in tears. I regret none of them.
So please, please more books. More bookstores. More book clubs, book buddies, bookmarks.
For the 2025 Bookstore Crawl, I hand-lettered the phrase, “Please More Books” and had the honor of seeing it as part of Jersey Collective’s Sticker Club. That year, I went to Watchung Booksellers in Montclair to see the sticker machine in action. After securing a sticker for myself (Summer Reading #3 by Red Sean!), I watched the machine for a bit to see it in use. A mom and her daughter treated themselves to a book-themed sticker. They left with a bagful of things to read, supplies to keep their family going.
Beth’s 2026 Crawl
This year, I hope to hit up at least one of the Bookstore Crawl events! Then some local favorites, The Collective in Verona and Montclair Book Center.
Beth’s Shopping List:
Any Jericho Brown poetry book.
Favorite bookstore outside of NJ: Maple Street Bookstore (now closed) in New Orleans was amazing.
Favorite bookstore merch: Strand tote bag. Iconic.