Scotland's Book Town Needs Your Help

Literature, international aid, and the importance of one global village

Wigtown-booktown.co.uk

I was all set to write about how Valentine’s Day has become a commercialized, capitalistic, fake, and bothersome holiday. (Maybe next year.) But then I received an email from Wigtown, Scotland, my favorite book town, one I have longed to visit but never have.

Wigtown is in the south of Scotland near the Irish Sea. The population, according to the most recent count is 880. It has a stunning pastoral landscape, a rugged coastline, woodlands and forests, moorlands and mountains.

And the number of bookshops?

Seventeen. That’s one bookshop for every fifty people.

Wigtown is Scotland’s National Book Town. New, used, children’s books, antiques. One of the businesses is an Airbnb where you can stay for a short time in an upstairs loft and manage the small used bookshop below, delivering to those who stay the romantic dream of running a bookstore in one of the world’s most literature-fueled cultures in one of the country’s most endearing villages.

The email I received worried me. It asked for help. “Times are hard,” Cathy Agnew wrote, the Chair of the Wigtown Book Festival. The email called for donations. Not an unusual thing from a charity group, which the festival is, but this ask was new. I have been following Wigtown for some time, as I once contemplated traveling there to run that Arbnb bookshop for a time. In fact, I’m still on a waiting list if an opening pops up. But over the years, I don’t remember ever receiving an email that so openly asked for money, needed money, desperate money.

“Would you consider donating £10 to our programmes?”

One of the first things I thought about when I read the email was how sad it would be to see Wigtown lose its glory. Is it in that much trouble? Can it sustain its allure and promise in a world where TikTok rules, where reading is lessened to an Instagram post? A sign of the times. Not one I like very much.

Wikipedia

But this also brought to mind the current fight over the federal government’s USAID program, U.S. dollars going to help the most marginalized people and regions across the globe. Elon Musk clearly has a callous view of the system, and how the narrative of helping one another preserve life and so many ways of life has fallen significantly on the priority list.

How did we get here?

I don’t mean to equate the woes of a middle-class, albeit unique village in Scotland with the absolute essentials needed in an impoverished native village in deepest Africa. Or even with the needs of so many in the U.S. But when USAID goes away, according to reporting from the BBC, help disappears for “schools, vaccination programs, medication and medical equipment, media organizations, and literacy programs.” Yes, literacy, literature and art. No USAID money goes to Wigtown, but places all over the world and in America that support reading, literature, and the arts will reel from these cuts. If not directly then indirectly. The loses will reverberate everywhere.

Yes, I hear the argument that this federal aid should stay to help people and program in the U.S. Why can’t we focus on our people? Truth is, USAID represents a tiny percentage of the U.S. budget. Less than 1% goes to foreign aid, according to recent reporting by PBS and Reuters. And if America doesn’t do it, doesn’t take the reins on this, China will, Russia will. They’ll do it to gain control. To gain favor. Do we want those governments filling in the holes America has left gaping?

It seems a bit of a dichotomy, even a disapproving stretch, to see in the same light a struggling charity organization in Scotland alongside the desperate medical care needs of Sub-Saharan Africa. But they are the same. Life needs food, shelter, medicine. The essentials. But life also needs art. In a 2020 New York Times essay about how humans need the creative arts to thrive and even survive, David Zwirner, a New York art dealer wrote, “our creative works carry the wisdom of the world.” We need health care to survive; we need art to live. Art is important. Books are important. Ideas are important. Wigtown is important.

In my memoir, Daylight Saving Time, I write about Wigtown, books, and my belief that towns like this need the people of the world to want them to survive, They are not just towns with some cute quirk to ponder or smile about. They are essential to what art can be for all of us, in the smallest corners of the world, not only in America. They are essential to our heritage, our personal journeys.

“Maybe there is something to all of this, attempting to answer the question of why I long for Wigtown. There’s no Scottish in my blood, not that I know of, but the United Kingdom is in the genes, certainly. Books are and always have been part of daily life—those books of my boyhood and all the books in my current home and here in the shed. Golf’s origins are in the United Kingdom, too. I love the game. My father loved the game.

I fold over the page to mark where I will resume my reading at a later time, and before I step out of the shed, I notice a ragged hardback book on the shelf by the door, a biography of Dickens. It was my mother’s, a gift from me many years ago. It is mine now.

Mom would have loved to walk the streets and browse the bookshops of Wigtown.”

Despite what may happen with American aid to those who need it around the world and knowing the fear and suffering this will likely cause, I’m going to make my own small donation to the Wigtown Book Festival. It’s not food or medicine or shelter, but it’s important sustenance, nonetheless. Sustenance for the soul. Sending £10 to Wigtown might seem misdirected in a world where people are starving, where medical care is days or weeks away. But literature, words, reading are part of the fabric of living, necessary for a healthy culture, society, and world.

I wish I could be Elon for a day and send all his millions to those he believes are not worthy of one U.S. penny. Just for one day. But until then, Wigtown will get my £10.

I think the exchange rate is pretty decent right now.

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More about Wigtown, its festival, and its legacy. Wigtown, Scotland.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His debut poetry collection, Garden Tools is due out in October 2025 from Finishing Line Press. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.