Small towns should take a leaf out of the festival book

OPINION: About a year ago we had some friends from Montana staying with us. After a Kombi roadie around the top of the South Island, we planned to end their visit with a couple of days in the Wairarapa for a bit of jet boating and some pinot sampling.

As we descended the Rimutaka range I warned our guests that Featherston was likely to be a ghost town and they’d be lucky to get a takeaway cup of Nescafe.

How wrong I was. The place was chocka – sidewalks heaving with people and not a car park in sight. Meanwhile many of the local merchants had tables set up on the sidewalks that were groaning with produce, cheeses, bread and books.

A lot of books. Mountains of books. That poignant aroma of old paper and ink fair wafted across State Highway 2. What we had stumbled upon was the Featherston Booktown event.

Turns out book towns are a global phenomenon. Normally a small rural town or village, within an easy drive to a major city, book towns have high concentrations of used and antiquarian bookshops. And typically a few coffeehouses and teashops.

Most book towns have developed in villages of historic interest or scenic beauty. Their residents set up events around books – selling them, writing, reading, illustrating, printing, making and publishing them.

And drawing visitors. Heaps of visitors. The first was set up in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, back in 1961.

Now they’re centrally anointed and dotted around the world, from Europe to Malaysia and Australia. And most recently in Aotearoa.

It didn’t happen by accident. Rather, a colourful group of locals manufactured the event.

Ironically, for the first Featherston Booktown event in 2015 there were no bookshops in town. For the Love of Books, the town’s established secondhand bookseller, was between premises, so it became a pop-up affair. Since then, For the Love of Books has bought and renovated one of the near derelict buildings in town.

Two new bookshops, Messines Military History Bookshop and Loco Coffee and Books have opened, and Mr Feather’s Den has

Given capacity constraints in the gateway cities (from dunnies to hotel rooms), having more regional events to meet that demand is a no-brainer.

focused on books. So, within 18 months, they’ve gone from zero to four, with more on the horizon.

The organisers tell me that people have started buying houses in Featherston off the back of the festival, and the biggest spike in jobs over recent months has been in the professional services area.

Of more interest to me is the tourism angle. About 2000 people attended the first event and closer to 3000 for the second one, with the hope the next will break 5000.

To date it’s been mainly locals, but with the frictionless distribution ability of the web and the passion of the book community, it’s now got international aspirations.

Hokitika Wild Food Festival founder Mike Keenan told me once that it took him four years before he really got on the international tourism map, so the Featherston crew hasn’t got too far to go.

Six months ago the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Enterprise published its Regional and Seasonal Dispersal of International Tourists report.

What it found was that while the four main gateway cities had the lion’s share of spend, some regions were managing to ramp up international tourist dollars.

Top of this list were Waikato, the West Coast and South Canterbury. It’s probably coincidence, but all of these regions have manufactured some sweet festivals – the Balloon Festival in Waikato, the Wild Food and folk festivals on the Coast and the Starlight Festival in Tekapo.

Given tourism levels are at record highs and there are capacity constraints in the gateway cities (from dunnies to hotel rooms), having more regional events to meet that demand is a no-brainer. It also aligns with Tourism New Zealand’s move to focus on the shoulder and off-peak seasons.

Gigs like Booktown can only help provide attraction and capacity. Better yet, they provide a window on real New Zealand.

Speaking personally, I’d rather be a visitor soaking up Booktown, the madness of the Hunterville Shemozzle or having a toss at the Taihape Gumboot Festival than I would be a guest at a flash lodge.

And, looking at other cracking small towns like Geraldine, Motueka, Waipukarau and Te Awamutu, I reckon there’s good potential to do more.

Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is an e-commerce manager and professional director. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he likes the smell of offset print in the morning. Disclosure of interest: MOD is a director of Tourism New Zealand.