Nevada City is, in fact, officially a book town. The term comes from a European idea for reviving little villages by concentrating booksellers there. This notion was dreamed up by an Englishman named John Booth in 1961 in Hay-on- Wye in Wales, when he inherited a castle and turned it into a used-book store. Then he bought up the rest of the town's buildings and turned them into bookstores, too. Today, the hamlet has more than 30 bookshops, which draw half a million visitors each year.