New chapter

The stage is set for wigtown’s starring role in the international book community. As well as three days of highbrow festivities that make up the fifth annual Scottish Book Town Festival in Wigtown at the end of this month, the village is to host a second major festival next May.

This month’s programme features Melvyn Bragg and Kate Adie, as well as Scottish writers and broadcasters such as Alistair Moffat, Colin Bell, Des Dillon and Alastair Reid.

Wigtown became part of the European book town phenomenon when it was declared Scotland’s National Book Town in the first debate of the Scottish parliament in 1999. A year before, the International Organisation of Book Towns (IOB) had held its first International Book Fair and Festival of Book Towns.

The idea of the book town was established by Richard Booth in Hay-on-Wye in 1961, when he opened the first of many bookshops that were to revive the fortunes of the sleepy Welsh border town. Twenty-three years later, Booth’s friend, the Belgian journalist and bookseller Nol Anselot, took Hay as his model and made Redu into its Belgian twin, the second book town in Europe. There are now 24 bookshops there, and house prices are said to have risen by 25 per cent.

Other book towns sprang up, all the way from Spain to Estonia. The latest one is back in Wales: Blaenarvon, about 30 miles from Hay, now has ten bookshops and in June it officially declared itself a book town, though it has yet to join the IOB. Sedburgh, in Cumbria, has plans to do the same.

Moira McCarty, who set up her bookshop in Wigtown in 2000, is due this autumn to take over as president of the IOB. This means that Wigtown will have two major festivals within a year: the IOB’s own annual festival is held in the home town of the president, so it will be coming to the Scottish village next May.

McCarty will take up the presidency in November, at a meeting in the second European book town, Redu, in the Belgian Ardennes, and the friendship between these two villages will be cemented.

The outgoing Dutch president is Miep van Duin, who owns a bookshop with a large English-language section in Redu. In July she made a trip to Wigtown for an IOB meeting, keeping an eye out at the same time for items for her own shop. She stayed with friends, Ann and Jim Vogler, who offer bed and breakfast at their shop, Web Books, about a mile from Wigtown. They moved there in 2001 after selling their previous business, a pub near Leighton Buzzard. Now they sell books - mainly on the internet, but they also keep several thousand on display in their Georgian house for visiting buyers.

Like most inhabitants of book villages, they are very relaxed. "Open on an ad hoc basis. Just ring the doorbell," is the advice given to prospective visitors. Ann admits that she has not really thought all that much about the festival yet, even though on the Saturday morning they will be hosting a talk by the travel writer Vitali Vitaliev.

I encountered the same relaxed attitude last month, when visiting Redu’s summer festival, La Nuit du Livre, when the streets are filled with bands, bars and dancing, and the shops stay open all night. When I enquired about the music that was going to be played, no one seemed entirely sure. In the end there were five different bands.

The Voglers plan to return Van Duin’s visit, and go to Redu early next year.

It is rare for book town booksellers to travel abroad on business - Van Duin is unusual in requiring a lot of foreign-language books for her shop - but McCarty believes the habit will grow. She has travelled to several European book towns, and recently took a stall at a giant book fair in the Netherlands - partly as a means of "marketing" Wigtown - and points out the advantages this can have for discovering rare foreign books that may be of interest to buyers back home. "I will go all round France, for example, and buy whatever books I can find about whisky," she says. "It doesn’t matter what language."

Wigtown is one of several success stories in the book town movement. In 1997, five towns (including Hay and Redu) took part in the EU project Booktown.net, which developed an online network to allow book towns in different countries to communicate, share ideas and, of course, sell books. An intranet was created, linking the five towns, and a common website was constructed. The IOB was formed, and took over the running of Booktown.net after the period of EU funding ended. When Wigtown joined in 1999, McCarty got involved in the organisation, becoming one of the three board members. She is now about to take centre stage in the organisation’s activities.

It is a lot of work for no money, but McCarty believes strongly in the importance of the IOB for enabling booksellers from different towns to see what others are doing and how they tackle their problems. All book towns, she emphasises, are essentially development projects, and benefit from sharing tips on best practice.

The IOB’s main activity is organising the biannual international festival, but it describes its main aims as being more far-reaching: to enhance relations, and thus strengthen rural economies and the cultural heritage of the book towns. The official title of the EU funding project that led to the founding of the IOB described it as "a model for sustainable rural development based on cultural heritage".

McCarty has been a book dealer for over 20 years (she still has her original shop in Orkney), but, she says, "It’s different being a bookseller in a book town. You’re involved in a development project. You don’t get any funding. You have to spend a lot of time on committees." The IOB holds quarterly board meetings. "That’s all self-funded," she explains. "It shouldn’t be, but it is."

Since more and more book towns became established and started to request membership, there have had to be changes to the IOB’s rules, to make it more flexible for the larger number of members. The meetings and the difficulties in running the organisation are part of a process that, she says, is aimed primarily at economic regeneration, not just the interests of individual booksellers.

McCarty takes pride in this and, like many European book-towners, tips a nod to the great creator: "If it wasn’t for Richard Booth, we wouldn’t be here. It’s made a difference to a lot of people’s lives." Booth is a special honorary life president of the IOB.

It might never have happened for Wigtown. Strolling around Van Duin’s shop during the Nuit du Livre, my investigations into the world of book towns were helped greatly by the discovery of a copy of Booth’s 1999 autobiography, My Kingdom of Books. He details his own opposition to the choosing of Wigtown over Dalmellington, Scotland’s other book town in East Ayrshire.

Booth favoured Dalmellington for what he describes as practical reasons. Wigtown, he says, was voted Scotland’s official book town because several good bookshops were already established there. "Book towns have a highly mobile economy and need to bring in a million books and thousands of tourists from all over the world," he wrote.

Dalmellington, he believed, being more easily accessible by train and plane (via Prestwick airport), and already containing sizeable factory buildings ideal for the mass storage of books, was a far more suitable choice.

Since being named the Scotland’s National Book Town, Wigtown has succeeded in a way that Dalmellington has not. Wigtown punches above its weight when it comes to statistics: it houses 30 book-related businesses, including what is claimed to be the largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland outside Edinburgh - The Bookshop - which has half a mile of shelves. The village, together with its nearby sister villages, Bladnoch and Kirkinner, has an estimated quarter of a million books for sale, as well as traditional crafts, musical instruments and sheet music. And in the Historic Newspapers shop, you can buy original copies of British and American newspapers dating back 150 years.

Over the weekend of this month’s festival, the village’s population of 1,200 is expected to quadruple. "The Scottish Tourist Board," Booth says, "raised 400,000 to develop Wigtown, and a book liaison officer was appointed at 20,000 a year. But government funding is a relatively minor factor compared to the difficulty of supplying books on obscure subjects, which are impossible to find elsewhere."

Four years after the crowning of Wigtown and the publishing of Booth’s book (during which time the town has received over 2m pounds of public and private sector investment), it is fair to say that Wigtown has also succeeded in attracting quality stock that is of interest to visiting buyers. During her visit in July, Van Duin found several French and English books about Belgium to take back to her shop, as well as "a beautiful old book in German about Swiss inns and hotels", she says.

"That book I hope to sell - with a nice profit, of course - at the end of this month in Saint-Pierre de-Clages, the Swiss book town," she explains.

The IOB’s definition of a book town is, "A small rural town or village in which second-hand and antiquarian books are concentrated", and it cites the spread of book towns as, "an exemplary model of sustainable rural development and tourism".

The rural location is certainly important for providing the appropriate atmosphere of tranquillity for browsing through old books, and this is another thing Wigtown has going for it. The place is rather out of the way, but its booksellers insist that this is one of its charms. Nestled next to Wigtown Bay, on the Machars peninsula, bound by the Solway Firth and the Galloway Forest Park, it is fiendishly difficult to get to without a car. But book town dwellers insist that this element of pilgrimage and adventure is all part of the fun of the second-hand book world, as is the hunt when you arrive. There are many rare books in Wigtown, and the booksellers are happy to help you track them down (most of the businesses in Wigtown also have their own websites for ordering books), but the greatest pleasure for many of the casual visitors to a book town is in randomly browsing to see what turns up.

Each book town has its own style. Wigtown and Hay go more for celebrity speakers, while Redu’s festival concentrates on cramming thousands of visitors into the village and entertaining them with music and beer. But what’s clear is that there’s much more to the whole thing than just books. It’s the joie de vivre and occasional politics of book towns that make them interesting.

Redu’s official association is currently in the process of forming a breakaway Francophone book town federation, with several French and Swiss book towns. McCarty and Van Duin are unable to explain exactly why this division has developed, but both cite language as one of the factors that complicate relations between certain towns.

Ingjerd Skogseid of the Western Research Institute in Norway, who is writing a thesis on the European book town project, is also unable to pin down exactly where the tension comes from, but puts it down to the mix of personalities one encounters in places like Wigtown and Redu. "They are the most sweet and wonderful people I’ve met, and they are also the most individualistic people I know, so you will always get different answers from them. But at the same time, that is what makes them the people they are," Skogseid says.

Ann Volger, in her idyllic house by the river, has a healthy approach to the stressful activity of organising inter-town relations, which I suspect is the policy favoured by most booksellers. "I don’t do committees," she says.

•The Scottish Book Town Festival, Wigtown, runs from Thursday to Sunday. For information and bookings, call 01988 402036 or visit www.wigtown-booktown.co.uk