It’s our 48th birthday on Sunday 5 March.

The last year has been a particularly busy one for Readings. We opened two new shops, Readings Kids and Readings Doncaster, we were awarded both the Bookstore of the Year Award at the London Book Fair International Excellence Awards, and the Independent Book Retailer of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, we took part in over 360 events around Melbourne and we distributed $93,000 worth of grants to community organisations through The Readings Foundation.

And we continued to do what we pride ourselves on doing best – recommending great books, music and films, whether it be on the shop floor, via our website, or in the pages of the Readings Monthly.

We thank all our customers for their continued support of Readings – we wouldn’t be able to achieve any of this without your enthusiasm and encouragement!

Here are some of our favourite moments, in photos, from the past 12 months.

In April, we were delighted to be named the International Bookstore of the Year at the London Book Fair. Pictured here is our Managing Director Mark Rubbo looking absolutely thrilled.

In May, we held a sell-out event with the legendary Gloria Steinem. She impressed us all by managing to sign 2,000 copies of her memoir, My Life on the Road, in the one go.

In July, the official script for the West End stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was released, and we threw a special Harry Potter party, complete with some amazing costumes.

In August, Andy Griffiths, Terry Denton and Jill Griffiths revealed The 78-Storey Treehouse to a packed audience of excited young readers. This hilarious story was our number one bestselling book of last year.

Also in August, we returned as the official bookseller of the Melbourne Writers Festival. We set up a pop-up shop in Federation Square and managed some epic signing queues for our favourite local and international authors. This picture is taken from the queue to meet YA superstar, Rainbow Rowell.

In September, salad-maker extraordinaire and cookbook author Hetty McKinnon came to visit. We prepared some of our favourite recipes from her new cookbook to help fortify her for the enormous pile of books we were asking her to sign.

Also in September, we opened the doors at our beautiful new Doncaster shop. This architecturally designed space includes sound-proofed nooks, and has helped contribute to our selection as a finalist for Inside Retail’s Customer Experience Store Design of the Year Award.

Again in September, we launched Clementine Ford’s remarkable manifesto, Fight Like a Girl. The atmosphere at this sell-out event was electric; here is a picture of the audience members holding up their copies of the book in response to Ford’s words.

In October we opened Readings Kids, a specialty children’s and young adult bookshop which features a beautiful mural from one of our favourite illustrators, Marc Martin. You can read a lovely interview with Martin about how this mural evolved here.

Throughout the year, one of our regular highlights is coming up with ideas for our weekly Bookface Friday photo, and then figuring out how to pose for them. You can see them all on our Instagram feed, as well as many other photos from around our bookshops.

All photographs are from our digital marketing manager, Lian Hingee.