A booklover's dream holiday in Scotland

There is a creative and popular alternative, however: The Open Book, in the coastal town of Wigtown, Scotland , offers a "bookshop holiday" experience in which guests volunteer to run the bookstore during their one- to two-week stay at the apartment above the shop.

"I think what draws people here is the dream.

The kind of 'what if' — 'what if I did this with my life,'" Jessica Fox, one of the founders of The Open Book, explains.

"It feels like you're the main character in a movie."
Fox herself turned her "what if" fantasy into reality by swapping her high-stress career in Los Angeles, where she worked as a filmmaker for NASA, for a quieter life as a bookseller in Wigtown.

Upon moving there, she volunteered at The Bookshop — Scotland's biggest secondhand bookshop — and soon realized she wanted to spend her life in the village and among books.

She wrote about how she found her place in Wigtown in a memoir titled "Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets: A Real-Life Scottish Fairy Tale."
The Open Book's guests are free to rearrange the window displays, determine the store's opening hours and be creative with organizing events, which in the past have included wine tastings, karaoke nights, tea parties, author talks, music sessions and much more.

The Open Book opened its doors in August 2014 and quickly went viral.

The concept remains extremely popular to this day.

Its bookshop and apartment are booked out two years in advance — as far as the Airbnb calendar allows.

New booking options typically open on the first Monday of each month.

"What keeps people here — and we've had people come like three times and still wait — is the community that they find," explains Fox.

"I think what everyone's searching for is connection.

Especially nowadays, with the screen in front of our faces, although it feels like connection, it isn't.

And what people get here in Wigtown is the most brilliant, joyful, analog experience of life."
That same year, the Wigtown Book Festival took place for the first time.

The annual festival, which runs in 2026 from September 25 to October 4, offers more than 200 events for people of all ages, bringing 14 million pounds (€16 million, $19 million) into the local economy.

Before those initiatives, Wigtown was in economic ruin.

Many buildings were empty and run down, threatened with demolition.

According to the Wigtown Book Festival website, there were 83 properties for sale in the village when the festival began.

Today there are four.