"Not your ordinary biscuit” is the unusual motto at the heart of Bookstock – Brighton’s new celebration of the printed word.

“We wanted it to be for ‘book people’,” explains festival director Ian Jones. “People who are interested in books, coffee, tea, cake and biscuits – but not your ordinary biscuit.”

So fans of the Tim Tam, fig roll or Wagon Wheel should feel right at home in the debut festival’s eclectic programme of talks, workshops and guided discussions.

“We decided we wanted to do what we were passionate about,” says Ian, who is also referred to on the festival’s website as the Overlord.

“We wanted this year to be wide-ranging and full of interesting stuff.”

As such, workshops led by New Writing South on how to get your book published and showcases by Waterloo Press of their latest poetry offerings, are being joined by discussions in the pub about the finer points of Geoffrey Willans’s schoolboy anti-hero Molesworth and a cartooning class led by nine-year-old artist George Pilsworth.

Among the more “zany” offerings which particularly appeal to Ian are an evening of spooky stories at The Grand Hotel on Sunday, June 12, with Rob Marks, leader of The Ghost Walk Of The Lanes.

Tickets for the night cost £10, with all proceeds going to The Grand’s chosen cause, The Variety Club children’s charity.

“We have a night at the Marlborough [in Prince’s Street] called Rattle Tales,” he adds. “Authors stand up to read their short stories and everyone in the audience has a rattle, which they shake if they like the story. It’s instant feedback from your audience.”

Although big name authors will be thin on the ground, the festival is welcoming special appearances from Chilean writer and left-wing activist Luis Muñoz, The Battersea Park Road To Enlightenment author Isabel Losada, who will be discussing Eastern spirituality and giving publishing tips, and the man behind children’s favourite The Queen’s Knickers, Nicholas Allan.

Iambic Arts Theatre, in Gardner Street, will also be hosting a celebration of Brian Barritt, a writer in the outsider tradition who wrote five wildly different books, which were praised by the likes of William Burroughs, Alex Trocchi and Timothy Leary. The talk will be hosted by John Higgs, who has also written a biography of hippy guru Leary.

Although the festival officially starts on Thursday, the fun kicks off this weekend with Brighton’s first Book Pyramid in the Add The Colour cafe, in North Road, the festival’s unofficial hang-out.

“It started off as trying to do something a bit unusual and green,” says Ian. “I was talking to people about book recycling and the main idea seemed to be to put them on Amazon marketplace.

“My daughter has a library in her room at home and one day she built a book fort, with turrets and everything. The idea for the book pyramid grew from those two things.”

The festival is asking people to donate books to the pyramid, which will be built in the centre of Add The Colour tomorrow. The aim is to build a “bookamid”

of more than 1,500 books to create a world record.

“We have four people in training to build the book pyramid safely,” says Ian.

“On Sunday we will have book-Jenga to bring it down, with people donating books and picking out ones they would like.”

Once the pyramid has been brought down the books will be donated to Oxfam or, in the case of the children’s books, to schools in Africa, or turned into notebooks as part of another workshop.

Plans are already afoot for next year’s event.

“We call ourselves a community book festival,” says Ian. “We would like to have an Open Books Houses event next year, where visitors can look at other people’s bookshelves and discuss favourite books, or authors can give talks in people’s houses. We want to encourage community engagement.

“We will learn from this year and evolve the festival. It is so much fun to do; I don’t think I have ever been involved in anything that has been so enjoyable.”

* Various times and prices. Visit www.brightonbookfestival.com for details and to book tickets.