As UNESCO celebrates World Book Day on April 23, we visit a Scottish coastal town that was saved by books.
There is a creative and popular alternative, however: The Open Book, in the coastal town of Wigtown, Scotland , offers a "bookshop holiday" experience in which guests volunteer to run the bookstore during their one- to two-week stay at the apartment above the shop.
"I think what draws people here is the dream. The kind of 'what if' — 'what if I did this with my life,'" Jessica Fox, one of the founders of The Open Book, explains. "It feels like you're the main character in a movie." Fox herself turned her "what if" fantasy into reality by swapping her high-stress career in Los Angeles, where she worked as a filmmaker for NASA, for a quieter life as a bookseller in Wigtown. Upon moving there, she volunteered at The Bookshop — Scotland's biggest secondhand bookshop — and soon realized she wanted to spend her life in the village and among books. She wrote about how she found her place in Wigtown in a memoir titled "Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets: A Real-Life Scottish Fairy Tale." Sharing the dream Fox also decided to share a taste of that fairy tale with the rest of the world. "I knew I couldn't be the only person with dreams of maybe having a different life, a little more of a romantic kind of life, surrounded by books, right by the sea," she recalls. That inspired Fox and others in Wigtown to open a bookshop where people could do exactly that — but without having to give up their daily life.
The Open Book opened its doors in August 2014 and quickly went viral. The concept remains extremely popular to this day. Its bookshop and apartment are booked out two years in advance — as far as the Airbnb calendar allows. New booking options typically open on the first Monday of each month.
"What keeps people here — and we've had people come like three times and still wait — is the community that they find," explains Fox. "I think what everyone's searching for is connection. Especially nowadays, with the screen in front of our faces, although it feels like connection, it isn't. And what people get here in Wigtown is the most brilliant, joyful, analog experience of life." Small village saved by National Book Town title Wigtown, home to some 1,000 residents, is located on the coast in the southwestern Scottish region of Galloway. Despite its size, the town has long been a book lovers' haven: The Scottish Parliament officially named Wigtown Scotland's National Book Town in 1998.
Before those initiatives, Wigtown was in economic ruin. Many buildings were empty and run down, threatened with demolition. According to the Wigtown Book Festival website, there were 83 properties for sale in the village when the festival began. Today there are four.
"It is essentially the books that have saved Wigtown. Wigtown has risen from the ashes — like a phoenix rising from the ashes — because of books," says Joyce Cochrane, owner of The Old Bank Bookshop, also in Wigtown. "And it's a community that's built on books. It's just a wonderful success story." Edited by: Cristina Burack Advertisement
