A Book Lover's Dream Vacation

Posted on November 7, 2005

Kenneth Turan of the L.A.Times has written an interesting feature about his vacation to two towns in Northern California where there is a large concentration of independent bookstores.

No less a personage than Richard Booth, who turned Hay-on-Wye in Wales into the world's first book town, had given his blessing to the Gold Cities Book Town Assn., placing the neighboring Gold Rush hamlets of Grass Valley and Nevada City, Calif., in the company of such other bookish venues as Larry McMurtry's Archer City, Texas; Kedah Darul Aman, Malaysia; St.-Pierre-de-Clages, Switzerland; and Fjaerland, Norway.

Not only was the Gold Country a lot closer than Fjaerland, but it also promised to be at least as pleasant, an area whose relaxed ambience, crisp mountain air and splendid scenery had turned writers including poet Gary Snyder into permanent residents. The location, a couple of hours north of Sacramento, proved as charming as the wine country without the hurly-burly of the consumption industry.

Not that I was looking to be totally relaxed. A potential book-buying weekend in a region with so many choices had to be planned with strategic care. Suitcases couldn't be too full because room must be left for those inevitably bulky purchases. Checkbooks had to be taken because booksellers don't always accept credit cards. And hours of operation needed to be rechecked because booksellers are not always obsessive about posted times. They leave that to their customers.

Hay-on-Wye in Wales has really embraced the "Book Town" concept. But one question: if you take a vacation and visit numerous bookstores, how in the world do you get all the books home? We think shipping them home is the only way, and that's not going to be cheap. Still, we do love a good meander around a nice independent bookstore.

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