Bucks County Book Festival draws hundreds of readers, authors to main event

On Saturday, hundreds of people came out to Broad Commons Park in Doylestown for the main event of the seventh annual Bucks County Book Festival, a bustling, bibliophile-filled celebration of all things reading and literature.

More than 40 authors from the region and beyond signed books and spoke on panels throughout the day, as festivalgoers of all ages perused books for sale by both independently published authors and literary offerings from the Doylestown Bookshop and the Lahaska Bookshop. 

Glenda Childs, co-chair of the Bucks County Book Festival, was one of the founders of the initial event, which took place in the fall of 2018. 

She said the festival has grown and changed over the years, with a record number of organizers participating this year. 

“We knew we needed to revamp it, so we put a call out to the community, looking for volunteers, to see if anyone was interested in continuing this,” she said. “We were overwhelmed with, I want to say, 80 people responded … We ended up with an executive committee of 16, and it has enabled us to have this extremely rich festival, very, very interesting aspects of vendors and independent authors and a stage with performers.” 

Krisy Elisii, a member of the festival executive committee and one of its founders, said it’s especially gratifying to see the festival bounce back after going virtual during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“As someone who’s been working on the festival from the beginning, we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to continue,” she said. “So to see the love for it and all the work people have put into it is really heartwarming.”On Friday, between 150 and 200 people participated in a “reverse pub crawl,” as nine authors rotated between three restaurants to speak with attendees at each local business. Sunday’s festival capstone event is a conversation between bestselling and award-winning author Laurie Halse Anderson and adult contemporary romance writer Nisha Sharma at Salem United Church of Christ in Doylestown.

According to organizers, more than 200 people had attended Saturday’s event before 11 a.m., with more people expected throughout the day. 

Lauren Ford, owner of the Doylestown Bookshop and the Lahaska Bookshop and a member of the book festival’s executive committee, said the turnout is indicative of a supportive literary and reading community in Doylestown and Bucks County as a whole. 

“Reading, any kind of art, is very important for people,” Ford said. “We have a huge library in the area that’s beautiful and well done, and lots of bookstores in Bucks County. I think people are very interested in it and I think they’re very loyal to local independent bookstores, and that’s what we need.”

Elisii, who works with Ford as the director of events and marketing for the Doylestown and Lahaska bookshops, said she has seen increased attendance at and interest in the more than 100 events hosted by the bookstores throughout the year, some of which include internationally-renowned authors: Elisii said the bookshops will host an event with Joyce Carol Oates in June, and she is working on planning an event with James Patterson later in the summer. 

“I think we’re having a little bit of a cultural resurgence or cultural renaissance here, right in Doylestown,” she said, noting that independent bookstores are a vital piece of that. 

“We’re readers, we love where we work, and we love the books, and we love what we recommend. So you’re never going to find that kind of service anywhere,” Elisii said. “We really bend over backwards to help someone find the right book, and also being very intentional, bringing author events into the community … Independent bookstores also put money back into the community. They give local jobs to people, and they support local nonprofits, local schools. So there’s so much more you get for your dollar when you spend it at an independent store.”

Elisii said she and other festival organizers were “very intentional” about inviting authors, for the kids’ fest in particular, who represent a range of experiences and backgrounds. 

“It’s also so important for kids to be able to see themselves in the books they’re reading,” she said. “It was very important to us that we were able to bring a very wide variety of kids and adult authors to this.”

For Olivia, 11, who attended the festival with her parents, the event was “an opportunity to get more books to read some more.”

An aspiring writer herself, Olivia was able to get three new mystery books, her favorite genre, and have them signed by the authors. 

Childs said it’s experiences like Olivia’s which make the book festival stand out. 

“It’s so magical for kids to meet their authors that wrote their favorite books, to actually get to have a conversation with them one on one,” she said. “But it’s even the same for adults. You can see them so excited to get to meet their author, and so that’s just thrilling for all of us.”

For Katherine Locke, co-lead of the Pennsylvania chapter of Authors Against Book Bans, which hosted a table at the festival, celebrations of reading and literature like the Bucks County Book Festival are another way to advocate for the “freedom to read across Pennsylvania.” 

At the group’s table, attendees could write their favorite banned book on a Post-it note. Titles included classics such as “The Giver” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the latter of which is one of the most banned books in the country, Locke said. 

Locke noted that while Central Bucks School District’s book ban has since been rolled back, there are other school districts across the state that are considering similar policies. Festivalgoers Saturday, she said, were “super supportive.” 

“We have school districts across Pennsylvania that are banning books for kids of all ages, and we’re really hopeful that we can push back against this movement,” she said. Tickets are still available for the book festival’s final event Sunday, featuring a conversation between bestselling and award-winning author Laurie Halse Anderson and adult contemporary romance writer Nisha Sharma at Salem United Church of Christ in Doylestown.