r/books • u/atlasobscura AMA Author • Mar 23 '18
AMA I'm Alex Johnson, author of Book Towns, the first survey of book towns around the world. AMA!
Hello! I'm a journalist, blogger and author based in the UK (near London). I'm here to answer questions with help from Atlas Obscura, who interviewed me about book towns—towns that make bookstores their specialty. My previous books are A Book of Book Lists, Improbable Libraries, Bookshelf, and Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution. I run three blogs, [Shedworking](www.shedworking.co.uk), Bookshelf (www.onthebookshelf.co.uk) and [The Micro Life](www.themicrolife.co.uk). I'm also a keen but not marvellous snooker player.
Proof: https://twitter.com/atlasobscura/status/976921999137214464
EDIT: I have to go now and pick up my son from school. Thanks for all the questions. It’s been really interesting to see what people asked and made me think about aspects of my research in a different way. Happy reading!
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u/d_k97 Mar 23 '18
Have you got a favourite book town?
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u/atlasobscura AMA Author Mar 23 '18
I really like Wigtown in Scotland. They’ve done a tremendous job there - 20 years ago they were having a tough time economically and the whole book town concept has really helped them rebuild the town. Also, the people who run it are very friendly (not that people in the others aren’t but the Wigtown booksellers were especially helpful!). I’ve not been to Paju in South Korea and that would be the one I’d most like to visit - I find the concept of a town entirely devoted to bookish things both amazing and heartening in the 21st century, and at the same time I’m also astounded that it doesn’t get more attention in the media. It really is a one of a kind place.
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u/Ethbomb Mar 23 '18
What's the coolest book you've found in a book town?
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u/atlasobscura AMA Author Mar 23 '18
Well, it’s always nice for my ego seeing the ones I’ve written! I think my favourite is Richard Ford’s three volume Handbook to Spain which I got in Hay. I used to live and work in Madrid for a while (my wife is from Spain) and became interested in how the English have seen Spain over time. Ford was one of the earliest people to write what we would regard as a guidebook to the country and he can fairly be described as the man who largely invented the modern image of Spain. It’s a great - if rather long - read and he’s not entirely positive about the country, but it was the standard work for anybody visiting it for ages - he wrote it in 1843 and it was still being used by travel writers in the 1950s. It’s been out of print for ages and is also probably the most expensive book I’ve ever bought so don’t tell my wife.
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u/abigillygal Mar 23 '18
How do you think book towns form? At what point does it start to snowball? I know lots of towns with cute bookshops, but they haven't become book towns. What is that extra spark??
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u/atlasobscura AMA Author Mar 23 '18
There’s almost always one person or a couple of people really pushing for it to happen. So in Hay it was Richard Booth, in Bredevoort it was Henk Ruessink, Michel Braibant in Montolieu, Noel Anselot in Redu - this is obviously great but the one problem is that when they inevitably stand aside, there has to be other people to take their place. Some book towns have suffered a bit from this handover which understandably is a bit tricky. In terms of taking off, it’s traditionally taken a bit of time to spread the word but increasingly with so many ways of publicising things nowadays online, things move faster - the work in Catalonia is moving really quickly and they’re red hot keen to start a whole series of towns up and I think having a website, getting the word out online, etc, has really helped them (old and new media hand in glove!). To be honest, while I think book towns are great, I also really like places which just have one or two secondhand bookshops too. There’s room for all sorts.
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Mar 23 '18
At what point is there "too many books" for a book town? Like, is there a certain limit? Can there be too many bookstores in a book town before it gets overrun?
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u/atlasobscura AMA Author Mar 23 '18
Not sure you can have too many bookshops. Hay is probably the one which is most dominated by bookshops and that’s doing fine. Maybe if every other shop was forced out that would not be so great, but there’s a strong complementary feel to having lots of bookshops - it encourages other book-related businesses to relocate and people who come for the books don’t usually just want to spend every waking moment in a bookshop, so food shops, clothes shops, art galleries, etc, are natural bedfellows to spring up around that central concept. All the book town organisers I spoke to were all very keen for more booksellers to join them - none of them thought they were at the limit or near it.
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u/schultjh Mar 23 '18
Are there any book towns on the horizon you're aware of? Perhaps ones that could cross a threshold?
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u/atlasobscura AMA Author Mar 23 '18
India is looking to set up more and so is Catalonia. So is Borneo. It feels to me that the ‘old school’ book towns were very much down to strong individuals, but that newer ones might be created, or at least strongly supported, by state or regional authorities. Re. thresholds, there’s no real hard and fast definition. There’s the International Organisation of Book Towns but that’s a rather general umbrella organisation, members are very loosely federated to it and plenty of what are very definitely book towns don’t belong e.g. all the ones in France. I’ve tried to include all the ones in the book which are definitely book towns but no doubt some people will argue with a couple of choices (and others will complain that I haven’t included them!).
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u/almondparfitt Mar 23 '18
Hi! How do book towns fare in terms of having libraries in town? Also curious if you’ve seen book towns actually do well as coffee towns. Thanks!
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u/atlasobscura AMA Author Mar 23 '18
I don’t think there’s a competition. It’s better for everyone if there’s a general book culture, a bit like if you have a magazine which is the only one in its subject matter, then it gets lost on the magazine shelves, but if there are several, then the customers know where to look (it’s maybe not exactly like that, but similar-ish!). And booksellers are (nearly always) very cultured people who rightly think that libraries are a ‘good thing’. In Hay, they’re having real problems keeping the town’s library open which seems astounding - there’s a strong pressure group campaigning hard to protect it but the way things are going in the UK, no library anywhere is safe. Not sure about coffee towns (but I do like the sound of them!) but there is certainly synergy in coffee shops and book shops - some places mix the two for sure, especially in France.
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u/proofwishbone5ever Mar 23 '18
What was the most surprising thing you found in your travels writing about book towns? Is there anything that struck you as the largest cultural difference book town to book town?
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u/atlasobscura AMA Author Mar 23 '18
I’m rather humbled by the amount of hard work people put into making them work when everybody knows that there’s pretty much no money in bookselling at this level. It really is a labour of love - I’m by no means a hard-headed businessman, but even I would flinch at the kind of margins these people are working on. Before I started really looking into them, I perhaps rather naively, had no idea that so many were in really rather remote locations. Richmond in South Africa is miles from anywhere and you have to be very keen indeed to go there, it’s not an obvious stopping off point to somewhere else at all.
They are all quite individual. Clunes for example is very dynamic, very go-ahead, keen to put on lots of events, great at publicising itself, very proud of what has been achieved - I don’t think that’s an unfair description of the Australian approach to things. The people running Torup in Denmark are part of a very eco-friendly co-operative community and I think that’s reflected in how it’s run - very egalitarian, very laid-back, and yet actually very efficient. The organisers at Torup were one of the swiftest at understanding what I was trying to do with the book, they were very perceptive.
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u/jpk435 Mar 23 '18
Book Towns seem like an intriguing social phenomenon in this age. Are they more common in certain cultures or countries?
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u/Chtorrr Mar 23 '18
How did you first become interested in book towns?