Bridge Books in Joburg’s CBD is getting books to more than 600 children a month, stocking small booksellers, running free street libraries and publishing titles in South African languages.
Johannesburg, South Africa (28 October 2026) – Ten years ago, Griffin Shea, a former journalist, began walking through Johannesburg’s CBD with a backpack full of books, asking street vendors to stock more South African titles.
Street vendors were the right people to ask. In the city centre, they are where many people actually come across books, often more than in any shop. If a vendor stocks a South African title, a reader who would never walk into a bookshop can find it.
But smaller sellers often can’t get new books easily, because they lack the systems and relationships big retailers use to order from publishers. Without that access, what’s on the street stays a narrow selection, and local writers lose readers before they’ve caught them.
That idea, now a decade on, has grown into Bridge Books, an independent bookshop in the city centre. It still connects booksellers across the CBD with publishers they would struggle to reach alone. That widens what readers can find, and it helps publishers, because a book that sells is a book that makes the next one possible.
Bridge Books also publishes its own titles, aiming at what readers can’t easily find now. That includes lost classics, anthologies, children’s books and books in South African languages.
Language is the point. People read most comfortably in the language they grew up speaking. A child learning to read is far more likely to stick with it if the books in front of them make sense. If books in those languages aren’t published, readers have no choice. Bringing back lost classics does something similar for writers, because a good book that has gone out of print is effectively gone.
Adding to the good it does in South Africa’s reading scene, Bridge Books runs a lending library and four outdoor Street Libraries called ‘Book Nests’ where books are free to borrow. Its reading programmes reach more than 600 children in the CBD each month. The organisation also runs writing workshops, literary events and walking tours of the city’s informal book trade, which gives writers somewhere to develop their work and vendors credit for the part they’ve played in getting books to people.
View this post on Instagram
Thousands of Litres of Fertiliser are Set to Change Lives Across SA
Community Support Opens a New Chapter for Promising Young Footballer Shaun ZoziRecently, Bridge Books’ work caught the attention of Création Africa 2, a programme backed by the French government that supports creative businesses in South Africa with incubation and help becoming investment-ready. Bridge Books was one of 15 finalists chosen from more than 340 applicants, and the only one in the publishing sector.
The programme has helped Bridge Books build EasyBooks, a platform for independent publishers and authors. The platform has a database of books available in South Africa. When it began, it held around 13,000 titles. It now holds nearly 500,000. Most small booksellers only stock what they hear about, and independent publishers rarely have a distributor doing the telling. So a lot of books never make it to a shelf. A big database like this one gives those books somewhere to be found, and gives sellers a way to find them.
There are books in street libraries. In the hands of hundreds of children every month. On the radar of booksellers who couldn’t see them before. Bridge Books has become a big home for South African storytellers, sellers and readers!
by 
