I woke up on Friday morning to find that several of my friends were sharing a rather nice picture on Facebook. You've probably seen it by now (the hits on photographic social bookmarking site imgur are well into six figures). It features a poster in a bookshop doorway with a poetic skit on Beatrice Warde's "This is a Printing Office" proudly declaring "This Is a Book-shop" with sentiments such as "refuge of all the arts against the ravages of time". Hmm, I thought, that looks a lot like The Albion Beatnik, the Oxford bookshop where I spend much of my leisure time, have given regular readings for the past three-and-a-half years, and which I posted to the Guardian's own literary map of Britain.

And then I got an email from Dennis, the store's owner, inviting me to an impromptu reading that night by Steve Luttrell, editor of longstanding US poetry magazine Café Review who was passing through. There was a postscript – 81,000 people had been looking at the shop in under a day, and he'd seen a link to a piece I'd written about it three years ago. So I really did recognise the picture.

Two minutes on Twitter and I found an article on Galleycat. Sure enough, there was a long quotation from, and link to, an article I'd written about the shop for the feminist literary website For Books' Sake back in 2010. How wonderful! What I've been saying for years is Britain's finest bookshop was finally getting the coverage it deserved. Not that there was a flock of tourists thronging to get in to hear Luttrell on Friday night, but a double-figures gathering for a damp afternoon poetry reading organised at about eight hours' notice is typical of the great response the clientele always drums up for events.

There are many things that are interesting about this story of an independent bookstore gone viral. Least of them though worth noting, are the disparaging what-a-snob kind of comments on imgur's notoriously reactionary sister site reddit. Likewise worth noting is the poster's indirect comment about ebooks. It's not new to see friction between ebooks and bricks and mortar stores of course, but conversations with Dennis over several years have made the impact of digital books on print sales, in Oxford at least, perfectly clear.

But what's most interesting here is that this story, and this poster, composed on the hoof and typed out in a font designed to recall the iconic cover of Howl, illustrates precisely what makes The Albion Beatnik, and many shops like it, such wonderful, vibrant, thriving places. Magritte-ly, the poster could just as easily have read "This Is Not a Bookshop". Because that is the key to the Albion Beatnik. And that is the way forward for many of not all great independent bookshops.

It's not just a surrealist statement, it's true. It was true back when I wrote the article for For Books' Sake back in 2010; even more so now. The Albion Beatnik is, more in many ways than more famous stores, the centre of Oxford's literary life. It is certainly the centre of the beating underground heart of Oxford culture. For four years now I've run Not the Oxford Literary Festival there, featuring leading figures from the literary margins who don't get a look in at the regular literary festival. Last November there was a month-long poetry festival, with events every single night featuring everything from local poet-activist Danny Chivers to workshops by Jo Bell and the obligatory Bernard O'Donoghue reading. Most nights, in fact, there is something happening there – from regular jazz nights to poetry from the likes of Michael Horovitz (it's not called the Albion Beatnik for nothing and I was lucky enough to read alongside the great man last year).

It's also the home to small presses (And Other Stories started life there, and used the shop as a home for its earliest events bringing together wonderful overseas authors such as Carlos Gamerro and translators). And magazines – Ferment, Structo, Oxford University Poetry Society's Ash, Dissocia – all have made it home, as have countless poetry groups like the Backroom Poets, Oxford Stanza, my own New Libertines. There's even an underground gallery space that hosts local artists, and Lucie Forejtova, the artisan stationer behind Immaginacija, who cuts, dyes, binds and sells handmade journals, and special edition chapbooks on site.

Not that it's all about arts and crafts anti-progress. At the very centre of the Albion Beatnik is an active Facebook page with more than 1,000 members where events are shared and crowds drummed up (our events have regularly attracted 50 or 60 people and spilled out onto the street). And, of course, there are the books. Specialist and beautifully presented, there are walls dedicated to Beat poetry, 20th-century American literature and translated works (want to go straight into somewhere and walk straight out – though you won't, you'll stop for one of the speciality teas and some jazz, and a chat with the devoted, enthusiastic and effusive devotees – with the Perec or Djuna Barnes you've been looking for everywhere? This is where to go) accompanied by Dennis' free zine-style reading guides with titles like American Literature of the 1920s or Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

This could not be better timing for a tourist snap to put a fabulous independent bookshop into the news, because The Albion Beatnik is the perfect illustration of everything that needs to be said about independent shops in the digital age. Yes, it is a great bookshop. But it is so much more. And that is what makes it both deserve, and achieve, its success.