Quotes on travel abound. And chances are you’ve read this some time: The world is a book and those who do not travel read only page. St. Augustine immortalized those words and now, AirBnB has literally taken it to heart. Always believed in the many worlds that exist between two ends of a book? Then, imagine a library. One that you run for a week. Or maybe two, too.

Destination Wigtown, Scotland’s National Book Town since 1998.

For the sum of £150 a week, guests at The Open Book in Wigtown, Scotland’s national book town, will be expected to sell books for 40 hours a week while living in the flat above the shop. Given training in bookselling from Wigtown’s community of booksellers, they will also have the opportunity to put their “own stamp” on the store while they’re there. “The bookshop residency’s aim is to celebrate bookshops, encourage education in running independent bookshops and welcome people around the world to Scotland’s national book town,” says the AirBnB listing.

While running shop is quite the experience and in some cases fantasies come true, it is also about community.

The initiative comes at a difficult moment for independent booksellers. Fifty-seven independent stores closed in the UK last year, according to the Booksellers Association. In 2005, there were 1,535 independent bookshops in the UK, with the number dropping to 939 by 2014.

So far, The Open Book has been leased around 10 times, with guests ranging from The Bookshop Band, which set up a bookshop bake-off cookery competition as well as putting on daily concerts, to a librarian from Portland, Oregon, a Dutch civil servant, and an 80-year-old couple. The latter pair had always wanted to run a bookshop, and regarded the experience as their honeymoon.

American couple Lee and Janet Miller, the shop’s most recent residents, are retired, although they owned and ran a bookstore in Sudbury, Massachusetts, around 20 years ago. “Today reminded both of us of why we so loved being booksellers,” they blogged about the experience. “It is of course dealing with books, which we love.

“But it is also the social interaction. As a bookseller, you are available to the world, and people come by for business and also just to connect. There is no division between personal life and business life, it all flows together as one … A couple who had been in the store last week stopped back in to browse but also to chat and see how things are going. We felt a part of the community today. We’re transients here, but we can be a part of it nonetheless for the time we are here.”

Read the entire Guardian article here.