Around the world, some towns and cities have turned their love of books into part of their identity. Converted churches, old cinemas, tiny book exchanges, independent shops, literary festivals, and shelves packed with rare finds make these destinations especially appealing to readers.
These 14 literary destinations range from tiny book-filled villages to major UNESCO-recognized cities. Each offers a memorable place to browse, discover new stories, and experience a community where books are woven into everyday life.
1. Wigtown, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland
Scotland’s National Book Town earned that official title in 1998, and it has been making good on the designation ever since. The town currently supports 17 bookshops and book-related businesses spread across a compact center that rewards slow, unplanned walking.
The Book Shop on North Main Street is the anchor of the whole operation. Its stock spreads across nine rooms on two floors, covering topics from Scottish history and natural science to fiction, children’s books, and maps.
Old Bank Bookshop, Well-Read Books, and The Open Book add further variety, the last of which offers visitors the unusual opportunity to actually stay in and run a bookshop for a week as a holiday rental.
The Wigtown Book Festival runs every autumn and consistently brings well-known authors to this quiet corner of southwest Scotland. The combination of a genuine working book town and a committed local festival makes Wigtown one of the most rewarding literary stops in the UK.
2. Montolieu, Aude, France
Perched on the slopes of the Montagne Noire in the Aude department, Montolieu made a deliberate decision in the 1980s to reinvent itself as a village du livre, a village of books. The plan worked remarkably well for a community of just a few hundred residents.
Its official literary village organization lists numerous booksellers covering subjects from art history and travel to old manuscripts and rare editions. Librairie Abelard on Rue de la Paix remains one of the most active antiquarian shops, stocking old volumes in French and other European languages.
What separates Montolieu from many other book towns is its museum dedicated entirely to book arts and crafts, covering the history and techniques of printing, binding, and illustration. Visitors can browse rare shelves in the morning and then spend an afternoon learning how those books were actually made.
For anyone interested in the physical craft of publishing, Montolieu is a genuinely uncommon destination.
3. Redu, Luxembourg Province, Belgium
With a permanent population of only around 400 people, Redu manages to pack an improbable number of bookshops into its compact streets. The village launched its book-town project in 1984, inspired directly by Hay-on-Wye, and has been a dedicated literary destination in Belgium ever since.
Its booksellers cover a wide range of specialties, including comics, secondhand fiction, books in French, Dutch, German, and English, and various collector volumes. De Eglantier and Crazy Castle is one of the more distinctive shops, where multiple languages and genres share the same shelves in a relaxed, browser-friendly layout.
Book markets and literary events continue throughout the year, keeping the village active well beyond a single annual festival. Redu also sits in the forested Ardennes region, so a visit combines genuinely good book hunting with some of Belgium’s most attractive rural scenery.
It is a small town that takes its literary identity seriously without taking itself too seriously.
4. Jinbocho, Tokyo, Japan
Jinbocho is technically a neighborhood within Tokyo’s Chiyoda ward rather than a standalone town, but omitting it from any serious list about places overflowing with books would be a significant oversight. The district around Kanda-Jinbocho station has been home to booksellers since the late 19th century, and it remains one of the most concentrated antiquarian book districts anywhere on the planet.
The main streets, particularly Suzuran-dori, are lined with shops ranging from multi-floor general sellers like Books Tokyodo to tiny specialists packed exclusively with old art books, vintage manga, military history, or foreign-language editions. Kitazawa Bookstore and Jimbocho Book Center are among the most well-known active shops, each with its own distinct focus and loyal customer base.
Every autumn, the Kanda Used Book Festival fills the streets with additional outdoor stalls and reportedly puts around one million volumes up for sale across several days. For a neighborhood that most visitors walk past without knowing what it contains, Jinbocho rewards curiosity in a very satisfying way.
5. Sedbergh, Cumbria, England
England’s official Book Town sits at the edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and its stone-built streets have a sturdy, no-nonsense character that suits a serious book town rather well. Sedbergh received its official designation in 2005 and has built a steady network of sellers, book cafes, and reading spaces since then.
The centerpiece is Westwood Books, which occupies a former cinema and holds more than 70,000 antiquarian, secondhand, and new titles spread across two floors. It is open daily, making it a reliable destination regardless of when visitors arrive.
A former bus shelter near the town center has also been converted into a small book exchange, which is either the most charming or most eccentric use of public infrastructure depending on your perspective.
Sedbergh’s annual book festival brings authors and events to the town each summer. The surrounding Cumbrian landscape adds a practical incentive to stay longer than planned, since the walking is excellent and the bookshops give you something to do when the weather disagrees with outdoor plans.
6. Tvedestrand, Agder, Norway
Norway’s contribution to the global book-town movement is a coastal community in the Agder region, where white wooden houses line steep streets above a small harbor. Tvedestrand joined the International Organisation of Book Towns and has built its literary reputation around a handful of serious antiquarian sellers.
Ex Libris fills ten rooms across two floors, covering an enormous range of subjects in Norwegian and other languages. Nynorsk Antikvariat is even more ambitious, holding roughly 100,000 books spanning several centuries and multiple languages in its active central-town shop.
That figure alone puts Tvedestrand in a different category from many book towns that offer charm but limited actual stock.
The town’s setting along the Skagerrak coast adds a visual appeal that many inland book towns cannot match. Visitors tend to arrive expecting a pleasant detour and leave having spent considerably longer than intended, which is generally the best possible outcome for a literary day trip in Scandinavia.
7. Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales
Richard Booth opened a bookshop in Hay-on-Wye in 1962, and the town has never quite recovered from the idea. Today, more than 20 specialist bookshops crowd its narrow stone streets, ranging from secondhand paperbacks to rare antiquarian volumes worth serious money.
Richard Booth’s Bookshop on Lion Street now spans three floors and also houses a café and an independent cinema, making it one of the most complete literary destinations in the world. The Hay Cinema Bookshop, true to its name, occupies a converted old cinema and holds around 200,000 secondhand and antiquarian titles.
North Books, which opened in 2022 opposite Hay Castle, focuses on contemporary fiction and even offers a bookish breakfast service. The Hay Festival of Literature and Arts, launched in 1988, draws authors and readers from across the globe every spring, cementing this Welsh market town as the undisputed capital of book towns worldwide.
8. Urueña, Valladolid, Spain
Spain’s official Villa del Libro sits behind medieval walls on a ridge overlooking the flat Castilian plain, and the combination of dramatic fortifications and a serious book culture gives it a character unlike any other literary destination in Europe. The village currently lists 11 book-related establishments within its compact walled center.
The shops here have unusually specific personalities. One covers fantasy and science fiction, another focuses on Japanese culture and manga, a third specializes in calligraphy and bookbinding supplies, and Libreria Primera Pagina near the castle offers a strong general literary selection.
There is also a museum dedicated to the history of writing.
Urueña hosts the Festival de la Palabra each year, bringing writers, storytellers, and illustrators to the village for public events. The walled setting, the Castilian light, and the concentrated variety of specialist booksellers make this one of the most photogenic and practically rewarding book towns on the Iberian Peninsula.
9. Featherston, Wellington Region, New Zealand
New Zealand’s official Booktown is a small community in the Wairarapa region, east of Wellington across the Rimutaka Range. Featherston is compact enough that you could walk its center in fifteen minutes, but its Booktown organization lists eight year-round book businesses, which is a remarkable concentration for a town of its size.
The most talked-about is The Dickensian Bookshop and Tea Rooms, where classic literature, collectible editions, New Zealand titles, cakes, and cream teas share the same building. Children’s specialists and general secondhand sellers add enough variety that a full morning of browsing across different shops is genuinely easy to fill.
The annual Featherston Booktown Festival brings authors and readers together each autumn, drawing visitors from Wellington and beyond. The town’s position as a gateway to the Wairarapa wine country means many visitors combine a literary morning in Featherston with an afternoon exploring the broader region, making it a practical as well as bookish destination.
10. Óbidos, Leiria District, Portugal
Few places in the world can claim to sell books inside a medieval church, but Obidos manages it without any apparent embarrassment. Livraria de Santiago occupies a former church in the old town, its stone arches and whitewashed walls now lined with bookshelves instead of pews, making it one of the most architecturally striking bookshops anywhere.
Obidos became a UNESCO Creative City of Literature in 2015, joining a global network of cities committed to promoting reading, writing, and publishing. The town’s literary project has since transformed several other historic spaces into bookshops and reading areas within the medieval walls.
The FOLIO literary festival, held each autumn, brings Portuguese and international authors into the cobbled lanes for readings, debates, and public events. Beyond festival season, the town’s year-round bookshops, whitewashed houses, and intact medieval walls make Obidos one of the most visually distinctive places in Portugal to spend a reading-focused afternoon.
11. Iowa City, Iowa, United States
Iowa City became a UNESCO City of Literature in 2008, the first city in the United States to earn that designation, and it has the track record to back it up. The University of Iowa’s famous Writers’ Workshop has been producing influential American writers since 1936, and that culture of serious literary work has shaped the whole downtown.
Prairie Lights Books and Cafe is the physical center of that scene. The independent store occupies three and a half floors on South Dubuque Street and runs a consistent calendar of author readings, conversations, and launch events that draw both local residents and visitors to the city.
Beyond Prairie Lights, Iowa City’s literary identity shows up in its independent publishers, poetry events, and the general density of writers and readers in everyday downtown life. This is not a town that performs its literary credentials for tourists.
The book culture here is woven into how the city actually operates on an ordinary Tuesday.
12. Edinburgh, Scotland
In 2004, Edinburgh became the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature, and that title was not handed out lightly. The city has produced an extraordinary concentration of writers across several centuries, from Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott to Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Rankin, and their presence is still felt in museums, monuments, and walking routes throughout the city.
UNESCO notes that Edinburgh has more than 50 bookshops, which is a serious number for a city of its size. The Writers’ Museum on Lady Stair’s Close covers the lives of Scott, Robert Burns, and Stevenson, while Makars’ Court outside commemorates Scottish writers with inscribed flagstones.
The Scottish Poetry Library adds another dedicated literary space near the Royal Mile.
Independent shops like The Edinburgh Bookshop keep the contemporary reading scene active and welcoming. The annual Edinburgh International Book Festival, held in Charlotte Square Gardens each August, is one of the largest public book festivals in the world, drawing hundreds of authors and tens of thousands of visitors every year.
13. Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland
Dublin’s relationship with literature is not something the city curates for visitors. It is simply part of how the place works.
James Joyce mapped the city so precisely in Ulysses that guided walks can follow Leopold Bloom’s exact route through streets that still exist largely unchanged. Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, W.B.
Yeats, and Bram Stoker all claimed Dublin as home, and the city has not forgotten any of them.
Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street is the heavyweight of the current book scene, a large multi-floor independent with strong sections across fiction, Irish history, travel, and children’s literature. Books Upstairs, The Winding Stair, Chapters, and Ulysses Rare Books add further variety across different neighborhoods.
The Dublin Literary Pub Crawl and various walking tours make the city’s literary geography easy to explore on foot. The Irish Writers Centre supports contemporary authors, while the annual Dublin Book Festival brings further programming to the city each November, keeping the present-day literary scene as active as the historical one.
14. Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand
Dunedin earned its UNESCO City of Literature designation in 2014, and the city’s Scottish heritage, university culture, and strong independent book trade all contributed to that recognition. The grand Victorian and Edwardian stone buildings that define central Dunedin give the city a physical character that feels appropriately serious about literature.
The University Book Shop is one of New Zealand’s most established independent booksellers, actively supporting author launches, literary festivals, and community reading events throughout the year. Secondhand shops scattered across the central city add further browsing opportunities for those with time to explore beyond the main streets.
The Dunedin City of Literature programme runs year-round events connecting writers, schools, and readers across the city. The student population from the University of Otago keeps the reading culture young and current, while the city’s broader arts scene gives literary events plenty of natural company.
Dunedin is the kind of place where books feel like part of ordinary street life rather than a designated tourist activity.
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