RRB: How many of these book towns have you been to? Where to next?ĪJ: I've been to the ones in the UK and a couple in Spain where my in-laws live. I think a lot of people are like this though. There's also an element of literary pilgrimage too to our vacations, so, for example, when I dropped my son off at an activity camp near Dorchester recently, I made an immediate beeline for the cottage where Thomas Hardy grew up and then the house in which he lived in later life. I still make a point today of looking up where the nearest good bookstores are once we've booked wherever we're going (though I do it quietly when nobody is looking to avoid my family's hurtful scorn). My father was an English teacher and librarian, and my mother ran a mobile bookshop, so wherever we went on holiday we spent about half of it in secondhand bookshops and always came home with our titchy car crammed with new purchases.

Yes, I'm afraid my sons would confirm that our holidays tend to be a bit book-dominated. So basically I wrote the book about them that I wanted to read, which I realize is a bit selfish. But nobody had written anything substantial pulling the various parts of the movement together, other than an occasional article online. RRB: How did the idea for this book come about? Are you an avid 'literary tourist'?ĪJ: I've written several 'books about books' and each time I did the research, I kept coming across more and more book towns around the world that were doing really rather well. Johnson, also the author of Bookshelf, Improbable Libraries, and another new book, A Book of Book Lists, chatted with me about Book Towns and some of his favorite literary spots around the globe.

This copiously illustrated guidebook offers travel tips and insightful details about each location - taken as an itinerary, it could make for one heck of a biblio-tour! Sure, we all know Hay-on-Wye, but how many other book towns can you name? How about forty-four more? In his new book, Book Towns: Forty-Five Paradises of the Printed Word, author Alex Johnson outlines the world's biblio-havens, from Hobart, New York, to Featherston, New Zealand, to Borrby, Sweden.

A Book of Book Lists by Alex Johnson