It is literary festival season, and there seem to be more than ever. In the next three months, there will be gatherings at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Swindon, Oxford, Cambridge, Hay, Glasgow — I could go on and on and on. The second wave of festivals comes in the high summer, before the final and long hurrah in the autumn.
The proliferation is perplexing. These are hardly the best of times for the consumer; you would expect demand to be relatively low, especially as these events are populated by the same authors saying the same things about the same books. Was Martin Bell, for instance, more or less interesting at Guildford than he was at Cheltenham last year?
Bearing all that in mind, I’d assumed that publishers and the major bookshops were the driving force, determined to find alternatives to the bookshop.
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