A pop-up store in Seoul is drawing long lines for collectible books, literary goods and themed snacks tied to the text hip trend. Minumsa and Today’s Cuteness are turning classic literature and poetry into illustrated items at Yongsan’s I’Park Mall, while GS25 has launched literary-themed breads in collaboration with them. The trend is spreading beyond Seoul to Busan book events and convenience stores. Buyers say the appeal is not only reading but also design, collecting and sharing on social media.
Visitors look around Minumsa's pop-up store featuring its world literature series and poetry collections at Yongsan I'Park Mall in Seoul, Sunday. Korea Times photo by Lee Hae-rin
At noon on Sunday, the third floor of Yongsan’s I’Park Mall in Seoul offered a compact map of what is famous among young Koreans: Instagram-famous desserts, fashion labels, electronic keyboards, anime and Harry Potter merchandise. In the middle of it all, visitors were quietly leafing through Virginia Woolf, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen.
They had waited hours to get there.
The books were part of “Beyond the Sentence,” a temporary pop-up store by Minumsa, one of Korea’s best-known publishers, and character intellectual property brand Today’s Cuteness.
