This village was a book capital — what happens when people stop buying books?
Nearly 40 years ago, books saved this village.
The community was shrinking fast. Farming jobs had disappeared and families were moving away from this pastoral patch of French-speaking Belgium.
But in the mid-1980s, a band of booksellers moved into the empty barns and transformed the place into a literary lodestone. The village of about 400 became home to more than two dozen bookstores — more shops than cows, its boosters liked to say — and thousands of tourists thronged the winsome streets.
Now, though, more than half the bookstores have closed. Some of the storekeepers died, others left when they could no longer make a living. Many who remain are in their 70s and aren’t sure what’ll happen after they’re gone.
It’s not just the businesses at risk. It’s Redu’s identity.
This is a place that celebrates itself as a village du livre, a “book town.” Its public lampposts and trash cans are adorned with bibliophilic hieroglyphs.
But what happens when the main attractions become less attractive? This is the challenge the village du livre must now confront.
“Life is changing, but nothing is dying,” said Anne Laffut, the mayor of Libin, the municipality where Redu sits. “Everything is evolving.”
Redu holds a vaunted place in the history of book towns, an honorific that originated with an eccentric Brit who brought hundreds of thousands of books to the Welsh market town Hayon-Wye in the 1960s.
Richard Booth, who died in 2019, transformed Hay into a global capital of used books, attracting numerous booksellers and opening a half-dozen shops of his own.
Booth’s success inspired struggling rural communities around the world to remake themselves as book towns, hoping to attract tourists and jumpstart their economies. Redu was the first copycat.
Spurred by a visit to Hay in the late 1970s, part-time Redu resident Noel Anselot hatched a similar strategy for his weekend home, according to a brief history of the place by Miep van Duin, who at 76 is one of the village’s longest tenured booksellers.
On Easter weekend in 1984, roughly 15,000 people descended on Redu, perusing the used and antiquarian volumes vendors sold out of abandoned stables and sidewalk stalls. The booksellers decided to stay. Others soon followed, along with an illustrator, a bookbinder and a paper maker. It was an eclectic, countercultural crowd. Young families arrived, too, and new students trickled into the faded schoolhouse.
The pièce de résistance: For the first time in years, Redu had its own bakery.
The village, van Duin concluded, had been reborn.
“It was much more lively then than it is now,” she said.
Now there are 12 or fewer bookshops, depending on how one counts — and, perhaps, who is doing the counting. Those who are more optimistic about the future of the bookstores tend to cite a higher number.
Those who are less hopeful say their trade has fallen out of fashion, and that people, especially young people, are reading fewer books.
“The clientele is aging and is even disappearing,” said Paul Brandeleer, owner of La Librairie Ardennaise.
Brandeleer was among the pioneers of Easter ‘84. His inventory includes tomes that are hundreds of years old.
Now, at 73, he’s living off his retirement pension. A sign in front of his store used to advertise his services as achat — vente, buying and selling, but the former has been crossed out. He doesn’t want any more books.
“I have 30,000 books, but when we disappear, they will go to the trash,” Brandeleer said. “We have no kids to take over, they are not interested.”
Surveying his shop’s rows of books, its low ceiling and brick walls, he offered a metaphor pulled from the stacks: “I think we are the last of the Mohicans.”
Down the road, the owner of Bouquinerie Générale — a store that specializes in bandes dessinées, French-language comics also known as BDs — had his own genre-appropriate comparison.
“We are like Asterix: The last village fighting everyone,” said Bob Gossens, invoking the French comic book series about a small Gallic village that resists the Roman Empire.
In his telling, the Romans might be global tech companies or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, pulling his clientele away one app at a time.
“The internet is breaking everything,” the 73-year-old said.
Nowadays, Gossens gets few customers aside from a core group of regulars who come for his rare editions. Those who do stop in, he has noticed, tend to treat the place like an exhibit of artifacts from another age, rather than a still-functioning store.
“They come here like they go to the museum,” he said.
Gossens does not predict a storybook ending for the shops in his village: “We will die a natural death,” he said.
A founding member of the International Organization of Book Towns, Redu is part of a network of similarly situated communes. Van Duin, who was the group’s first board president, said the still-thriving book towns are in Britain, including Scotland’s Wigtown, which hosts a renowned literary festival.
“When you go to a book town in the U.K. in November, sometimes you have to wait before you can pay,” van Duin said. “And here, when somebody comes in November and buys a book, I could kiss him.”
While a return to the glory days is probably out of reach, van Duin is hopeful that Redu will retain its artistic vibe, even if the bookstores continue to become less plentiful.
“It will stay a special village, because that’s the reputation and that doesn’t die very quick,” she said.
This is a natural process in a village life cycle, said Maarten Loopmans, a geography professor at Belgium’s K.U. Leuven. If a community like Redu is to survive, eventually a new generation must take over and strike a balance between “livability for themselves and, at the same time, an asset to sell to the outer world,” he said.
“I’m pretty sure it will still be attractive to tourists,” Loopmans added. “But it will need to reinvent itself with a new story that is more attractive these days.”
When Johan Deflander and Anthe Vrijlandt moved to Redu about six years ago, the couple’s friends warned them they were making a mistake.
“Everyone said, ‘Oh you’re going to buy a house in Redu? Isn’t that the village that’s going to die? Where they used to have bookshops?’ “Deflander said.
The couple, who are in their early 50s and live part of the year in Kenya, wanted to open a new kind of establishment, one that moves beyond the “stuffy, old, bankrupt secondhand bookshop idea,” Vrijlandt said.