Photo: Bjørn/Book Towns
The book town of Fjærland, Norway. About 30 or 40 villages around the world have a high concentration of booksellers who are drawing visitors and building the local economy.
When I was writing my March post about Hobart, an upstate New York village that boasted five bookstores, I learned that the idea of being a “book town” wasn’t an entirely new concept. In fact, there may be as many as 40 book towns around the world.
Unsurprisingly, someone has written a book about them. Sarah Laskow interviewed Book Towns author Alex Johnson for Atlas Obscura.
“What makes a book town? It can’t be too big — not a city, but a genuine town, usually in a rural setting. It has to have bookshops — not one or two, but a real concentration, where a bibliophile might spend hours, even days, browsing. Usually a book town begins with a couple of secondhand bookstores and later grows to offer new books, too.”
Atlas Obscura: “What makes a good book town?”
Alex Johnson: “Well, they’re all very picturesque. That’s one of the reasons they generally get picked. They’re away from cities, so rents are low. … Often, they’ve been in places where economically things have been a bit slim, or the population’s been decreasing as the younger people move away into the cities. Hay-on-Wye, in Wales, was the first one, and it started in 1977.
“How have book towns changed over the past few decades?
“I think they’re actually quite similar to when [bookseller] Richard Booth came up with the idea. He started Hay as a book town very much to regenerate it — to provide employment, keep people in Hay, and provide an actual tourist destination. … Book towns are tiny little places, and people wouldn’t come to them otherwise. …
“What does it take to set up a book town that will survive?
“They’ve got to be sensible about providing a large amount of bookshops. You can’t do it with one or two. You need plenty. You need to cover a range of things. Some of the most successful ones have been where it’s not just bookselling. There are publishers or printers or artists or designers. …
“Nearly all bookstore owners, especially secondhand ones, have their own interests. So they tend to specialize in things anyway. … A few places [have] quite a strong central group, but most of them are quite loose. They nearly all have booksellers associations, but it’s quite like a friendly cooperative. …
“If someone wanted to understand the range of book towns, what four or five would you send them to?
“I would definitely go to Hay. … Paju Book City in South Korea. There’s a huge number of publishers and printers there, as well as books. … Clunes, in Australia, has done a very good job of building themselves up. Originally it was a gold rush town, and they quite often shoot films there. …
“Wigtown, in Scotland, is a good example of a place that’s really regenerated. Twenty years ago, it was having a really tough time — shops and industries closing, people moving out. And they’ve absolutely turned it around.“
More here.
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