Britisher Richard Booth, a colorful Oxford graduate, believed that filling his home town of Hay-on-Wye, in Wales, UK, with bookshops could turn it into an international attraction. By the 1970s the dream had become reality. Today, Hay – dubbed the ‘’book capital of the world’’ – attracts around 300,000 visitors each year and counts some 30 bookshops, including Richard Booth’s Bookshop which advertises itself as the largest secondhand bookshop in Europe with a stock of some million volumes.
Hay was also the first of what are now known as Book Towns. The International Organisation of Book Towns (IOB), of which Booth is Honorary President, lists 12 of them in Europe and one in Malaysia.
According to the IOB website’s membership roster, there are two other Book Towns besides Hay in the UK: one is Wigtown, Scotland, the other is Sedbergh in the Yorkshire Dales National Park not far from the Scottish border. There are two Book Towns in Norway: Tvedestrand on the country’s south coast, and Fjaerland where converted barns, stables and boathouses hold some 4 km (2.5 miles) of bookshelves – that’s 12 shops and 250,000 books. Similarly to many other Book Towns, these often combine books with arts and crafts or a café, and shop premises are open only during the summer season (the end of April through the end of September) albeit 7/7 from 10 to 6.
Book Towns: An EU Project
Other European Book Towns that are also IOB members are to be found – one town in each country – in Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.
A few years ago, five Book Towns (Bredevoort, Netherlands, Fjaerland, Hay-on-Wye, Montolieu, France and Redu, Belgium) participated in a two-year EU project ‘’European Book Town Network: A Telematics Application Based on a Model for Sustainable Rural Development Based on Cultural Heritage’’conducted together with a Norwegian research institute and Luton University in the UK.
Adding perspective to the EU project and the slow development elsewhere particularly in the US of the Book Town concept is a 2005 article by John C. Huckans called ‘’Book Towns Revisited’’ on the Book Source Magazine website. Huckans points out that one of the reasons for the relative success of the concept in Europe lies not only among other factors in smaller distances (none of the Book Town destinations are impossibly far from major cities, whereas in the States places with overheads low enough to support the idea would probably be too remote) but also in EU or other subsidies, government or otherwise, that may help them along.
Visiting Book Towns On The Internet
Practical realities aside, the concept is an appealing one and just as one could spend hours lost in a quiet, book-filled shop browsing, reading, discovering new worlds, clicking through the Book Town chapters on the IOB website can be just as absorbing. Very few of the sites have an English version, but the visuals communicate the gist. Some towns include their tourism office’s site, or that of the local hotel (Hay advertises a holiday let called the Castle Flat – apartment accommodation in the 13th century castle) as well as bookshop sites so one comes away with a pretty good idea of what it would be like to visit the place.
Finland’s Book Town, Sysma, is in the heart of the country’s lakelands. Holland’s – which also features an English Bookshop, and several German ones in addition to shops selling books in Dutch – is in Bredevoort, the historic center of which is on the Dutch national heritage list. Painter Gerd Renshof, who specializes in painting ‘’book still lifes’’ – lush arrangements of splendid leather-bound, gold-tooled volumes – is also based here.
Italy’s Book Town is Montereggio, in Tuscany, which has a centuries-old book heritage. One of Italy’s most prestigious literary prizes saw the light of day here in 1952.
Book Town Festivals
Along with strengthening rural economies by promoting existing Book Towns and e-commerce so bookshops ‘’can offer their books to an universal public, also or especially in the quiet season (‘winter economy’)’’, and ‘’to maintain regional and national cultural heritage and to stimulate the international public to get acquainted with it’’, the IOB’s mission statement also lists organizing an International Book Town Festival every second year. The next one will take place in Wünsdorf-Waldstadt, Germany, 9-12 September 2010.
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