European book towns: Hay-on-Wye, Redu, Bredevoort, Fjærland and Montereggio · Italy, Belgium, Norway, United Kingdom
Europe’s Book Towns: Villages Built Around Secondhand Bookshops
Discover Europe’s book towns: small villages that built a new identity around secondhand and antiquarian bookshops. Learn how the movement began and what makes Hay-on-Wye, Redu, Bredevoort, Fjærland and Montereggio worth a visit.
Published September 27, 2026
Europe's Book Towns: Villages Built Entirely Around Secondhand Bookshops
Literary tourism keeps showing up as a 2026 trend, and almost every article about it points to the same handful of places: Shakespeare's birthplace, Jane Austen's house, a café where a famous author once wrote a chapter. Almost none of them mention that there's an entire category of destination purpose-built for book lovers — small villages, mostly rural, that reinvented their entire local economy around secondhand and antiquarian bookshops. There's even an International Organisation of Book Towns coordinating them. Here's how the movement started, and which towns are worth the detour.
It Started With One Man Filling Empty Buildings With Books
In 1961, a young academic named Richard Booth opened a secondhand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, a small market town on the Welsh-English border with barely 1,600 residents. The shop succeeded fast enough that other booksellers followed, filling the town's empty storefronts one by one, and within a couple of decades Hay-on-Wye had roughly 20 bookshops — more than towns fifty times its size. Booth, only half-joking, crowned himself "King of Hay." The Hay Festival, launched in 1987, now draws around 250,000 visitors a year and remains the UK's foremost literary event.
The idea spread deliberately, not accidentally. Booksellers from other struggling small towns visited Hay, took notes, and went home to replicate it. By 2001, enough towns had adopted the model that they formally organized as the International Organisation of Book Towns, headquartered — fittingly — nowhere in particular, since its member towns span Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, Croatia, and beyond. The organization's own definition is specific: a book town is "a small, preferably rural, town or village in which secondhand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated" — deliberately excluding cities, where a cluster of bookshops is just a neighborhood, not an identity.
Redu, Belgium: The Village a Single Trip to Wales Rebuilt
Redu, a village of roughly 500 people tucked into the Belgian Ardennes, owes its entire literary identity to one resident's holiday. In 1979, villager Noël Anselot visited Hay-on-Wye, came home inspired, and began recruiting booksellers to set up shop in Redu's otherwise unremarkable farmhouses. The gamble worked: Redu became continental Europe's first official book town in 1984, and today its bookshops — many still housed in converted barns and stone farm buildings — outnumber almost every other kind of business in the village. Twice a year, Redu hosts a book-themed festival that turns its handful of streets into an open-air market drawing collectors from across Belgium and France.
Bredevoort, Netherlands: A Book Market on the Town Square, Every Month
Bredevoort, a medieval town of about 1,500 people near the German border, became an official book town in 1993 and now holds more than 20 secondhand and antiquarian bookshops within its small fortified center. What makes Bredevoort distinct is the monthly ritual: every third Saturday, the town square fills with a book market drawing dealers from across the Netherlands, Germany, and beyond, selling in three languages simultaneously. Bredevoort is also a founding member of the International Organisation of Book Towns, and it hosted the very first International Book Town Festival in 1998, the event that eventually formalized the entire movement.
Fjærland, Norway: Bookshops Inside a Fjord, Open by an Honor System
Fjærland might be the strangest book town on the list simply for its setting: a tiny village at the end of a Norwegian fjord, surrounded by glaciers, with a year-round population small enough that most of its bookshops operate unattended in summer, running on an honor system where visitors leave payment in a box. Fjærland became a book town in 1995, and its remoteness — no road access existed until the 1990s — makes the sheer concentration of antiquarian books feel almost absurd against the landscape of ice and water surrounding it. The village hosted the fifth International Book Town Festival in 2006, an event remembered locally for an uninvited guest: a wild bear that wandered in looking for food near the fjord.
Montereggio, Italy: The Village That Peddled Books Door to Door for Centuries
Montereggio, a hilltop hamlet in Tuscany's Lunigiana area, earned its book-town status differently from the others — not through a single modern founder, but through a genuine centuries-old trade. Villagers here worked historically as itinerant booksellers, walking from town to town across Italy selling books door to door, a tradition documented back hundreds of years and still celebrated with an annual book festival and prize. Unlike Hay or Redu, Montereggio's literary identity isn't a 20th-century revival; it's closer to a living fossil of how books actually moved through rural Europe before publishing and retail consolidated everything into cities.
Why Nobody's Really Covering This
Book towns sit in an odd gap: too niche for mainstream travel media, too scattered geographically for a single definitive guide, and too unglamorous — used bookshops in farm buildings, not five-star literary hotels — to fit neatly into "literary tourism" content built around famous authors' houses. That gap is exactly the opportunity. A weekend built around Redu, Bredevoort, or Montereggio delivers something most heavily covered literary destinations can't: actual, browsable, buyable stacks of old books, in villages small enough to walk end to end in an afternoon.
Plan Your Book Town Weekend on Keptour
Once you've picked a book town to chase, Keptour has the surrounding city or region already mapped — the nearest train stations, cafés, and places to stay before or after your bookshop crawl. You can build the rest of your route around it, save the spots that catch your eye, and share the plan with whoever's coming along to help carry the books home.