Like Woodstock, for Bookworms

With slumping book sales and so much written about the Death of the Book (thanks, Kindle), arriving at the U.K.’s Hay on Wye literary festival is like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole.

Hay on Wye — a tiny town on the England/Wales border — has a population of 1,500, but 41 bookstores (that’s one per every 37 residents), including the largest secondhand bookshop in Europe. For the 10-day May literary festival (it ended May 31), dubbed “the most prestigious festival in the English-speaking world” by the New York Times, some 80,000 visitors swamp the town for a bookish bash.

They attend lectures, they eat organic, locally-produced food (the line for sheep’s milk ice cream rivals that at a Ben & Jerry’s on free cone day), they recycle (seriously), and they check out the selection at the outdoor display of books sold on the honesty system (30 pence for a paperback, 50 pence for a hardback.). As Alice would say, curiouser and curiouser.

The outdoor bookstore is open 24 hours, so you can — and people do — check it out on the way home from the pub. Not that anybody wakes up with a book-buying hangover because nobody is drunk (except for a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing “stag ‘do,” which a British bachelor party. They’re not looking for books, anyway — only a taxi to a nearby disco.)

Bill Clinton, a 2001 speaker, called the festival the “Woodstock of the mind.” It’s quite possibly the most civilized festival on earth. Speakers receive a single perfect long-stemmed white rose, like debutantes. The port-o-potties (or porta-loos, as they’re called here) are always perfectly clean, and hung with reproductions of Impressionist paintings featuring readers.

At lectures on young Henry VIII — and there are lectures about everything from finance to George Eliot — people ask questions such as “Why the dissolution of the monasteries?” because they actually want to know, not because they’re worried about their class participation grade. There is a perfectly calm and organized line of people 100-deep to have Doris Kearns Goodwin sign her Team of Rivals biography of Abraham Lincoln. When it’s announced the shop has sold out, there is no grumbling or protest — only a lot of “Shall we go and have a drink then?” The drink is usually Pimms, the gin-based liquor mixed with lemonade and found at other — very civilized, of course — British summer events like Wimbledon and the Henley Royal Regatta.

If you need a break from books, there are sessions on knitting and hat-making. “They told me I sold out faster then Desmond Tutu,” Yvette Jelfs, the couture milliner (and BBC Royal Ascot hat commentator), told me happily. For the record, the knitting sessions also sold out.

Of course, there’s also shopping: nature-inspired jewelry, locally grown fruit, and my favorite: $90 deck chairs emblazoned with the green-and-white cover of Katherine Mansfield’s novel The Garden Party.

I’d like the life to go with that, please.