A group of New York Times journalists has test-drove a set of New York City book crawls — walking routes that wind through bookshops specializing in comics, drama, fantasy and romance.

The project, reported under the title "These New York City Book Crawls Were Made for Walking," sends readers through the city on foot, linking independent retailers by genre rather than by neighborhood. Each route gathers shops with a shared specialty: one path for comics, one for drama, one for fantasy, one for romance.

The Times framed the crawls as walking itineraries from the outset. The paper's journalists walked the routes themselves before publishing, testing whether the paths hold together as published guides.

The genre-by-genre structure sets the project apart from conventional bookstore roundups. Instead of ranking shops or surveying a single district, the crawl format asks readers to commit to a theme — comics, drama, fantasy or romance — and follow it across the city on foot.

For New York's specialized booksellers, the exposure comes at a moment when independent bookshops are competing for foot traffic against online retail. A route in a major national outlet that directs readers physically from one shop to the next functions, in effect, as an endorsement of the walking customer.

The crawl concept also mirrors practices from other corners of the culture world: gallery crawls, pub crawls, studio tours. The Times has applied that logic to bookselling, treating the city's specialty shops as a linked circuit rather than isolated destinations.

What the journalists found on the routes — and how the shops received them — appears in the Times' own reporting on the walks.