I doubt there are many keen readers who have not, in an idle moment, wondered if they should throw in everything and open a bookshop, preferably in a rural town, far from pollution and noise.

Even today, when the faceless Amazon dominates the commercial side of the trade, the idea of the cluttered, ramshackle, paper-scented bookshop, of the sort that would not be unfamiliar to Mr Pickwick, holds an enduring appeal.

In part that explains the allure of Wigtown, Scotland's National Book Town, and in particular of its popular book festival, which starts on September 26.

For those not familiar with the town, it is a pretty, salt-scented place on the Solway estuary, so quiet (except during the festival) that the sound of squabbling seagulls is its notion of a din. Though it consists of a long, airy main drag and square, and a few side streets leading towards sea and hills, its wealth of second-hand bookshops is astonishing.

Catering to most readers' needs - history, feminism, fiction, military guides, comics, cookery and much, much more - its shops are a year-round attraction. In fact, until recently, it was easier to find a first edition of the King James Bible than somewhere to eat after six o'clock.

During the festival, the streets and cafes teem, while in the depths of a Galloway winter, there are few more cheering prospects than a town where one can dart from shop to shop, evading sleet and rain the way it's said you could once cross Aberdeen harbour without getting wet, by leaping from boat to boat.

Capitalising on its prime asset, Wigtown Book Festival is about to launch an original initiative. It is inviting applications from writers, artists, thinkers and bibliophiles to look after a bookshop for a period of up to six weeks.

During their residency they will have full run of the place, and be obliged not only to keep the shop tills singing, but write a regular blog about their experience.

I would apply now, if I thought they'd have me, if only to knock the dream on the head. The problem is, being a caretaker with no real responsibility for profit or bills, it might only brighten the frosting on the fantasy, rather than allow the steady drip-drip of reality to turn it into mush.

A friend, who has spent years in the business, no longer panders to romantics like me, among whom are those she especially despises, who come into her shop and, when asked if they are looking for anything in particular, reply, smiling: "No, we just like the smell of books". Sniffing should not come free, her expression suggests. The perfume of her premises has taken years of work and worry to distill.

The repellent Gordon Comstock, in George Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying, works in a second-hand bookshop that ought to destroy the idyll for many of us. A mangy young man with a bitter soul, he reflects that "in all bookshops there goes on a savage Darwinian struggle in which the works of living men gravitate to eye-level and the works of dead men go up or down - down to Gehenna or up to the throne, but always away from any position where they will be noticed."

What appears to ordinary browsers to be a shop of dreams is anything but. Comstock cannot hear the word "remainder" without a shudder, since his only book sold 153 copies, and even when remaindered languished untouched. "Dull-eyed he gazed at the wall of books. He hated the whole lot of them, old and new, highbrow and lowbrow, snooty and chirpy. The mere sight of them brought home to him his own sterility. For here was he, supposedly a 'writer', and he couldn't even 'write'!"

Far be it for me to discourage anyone from applying for the Wigtown residency, but those writers who do - and novelists above all - should make sure they are made of confident stuff. Otherwise, how to withstand the competition they'll face from the long-dead and dusty as well as the living?