By HOWARD POUSNER and JAMIE GUMBRECHT

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The literary love-in that is the AJC Decatur Book Festival, which kicks off its fourth edition Friday, has been grooving only since 2006, but it’s already the country’s fourth-best-attended event of its sort.

The 70,000 people who swarmed Decatur Square last year to catch 350-plus authors suggest that rumors about the death of the book and readers’ shriveling attention spans are greatly exaggerated.

Festival organizers and publishing industry participants cite many reasons for how the event has come so far so fast: It’s well-organized, the programming is diverse in every respect, the authors feel appreciated, and, for an undertaking that has the potential to reek of haughtiness, it’s a heckuva lot of fun.

Everyone also believes that Decatur itself — the DeKalb County seat that fancied itself as “Mayberry meets Berkeley” well before the country’s largest independent book fest set up its tent — plays a significant part in this success story.

Among those believers is Thomas Mullen, who appeared at the 2007 gathering with his first novel, “The Last Town on Earth.” Mullen had appeared at a number of other book fests, most so spread out that he was left feeling there was no “there” there. In contrast, he found Decatur a beehive of activity swirling around its 1898 courthouse with a true festival buzz.

“There are readings all around you, all within walking distance, there are people everywhere buying books, swapping stories of which authors they just saw or want to see, taking their kids to the children’s’ parade, window shopping along Ponce [de Leon Avenue], eating on the square,” Mullen said. “Just seeing the crowd is a visceral shot to the creative heart.”

Not long afterward, he e-mailed festival program director Thomas Bell and William Starr, executive director of the Decatur-based Georgia Center for the Book, that he was planning to move his family there (his wife’s new job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and in-laws in Duluth were also factors). Before long, his in box dinged. It was Decatur Mayor Bill Floyd welcoming him in advance.

That speaks to the support system in this burg known for hosting big parties such as the Decatur Arts Festival on relatively tiny budgets, aided by giant volunteer efforts.

Book fest executive director Daren Wang considers the 21-year-old Arts Festival, held each Memorial Day weekend, as “our grandpappy in some ways,” including the older festival’s honing to a science the unsexy planning and permitting for items such as porta potties.

When Wang and fellow festival co-founder Bell had lunch with city leaders in 2005 at Decatur’s Cafe Lily, ostensibly to get them on board, they already knew the officials had been briefed and that the answer was yes.

But Floyd did have one cosmic question for which they were not prepared: Are there going to be funnel cakes?

“He was saying this should be fun,” Wang said, discussing the query like it was a sage pronouncement from Yoda. “We had not thought of [funnel cakes], but that was a good guiding principle.”

If Wang, who had produced arts series on public radio for 15 years, and Bell, then a Creative Loafing book and dance critic, knew a lot more about literature than funnel cakes, that was important, too.

Wang had returned from the SC Book Festival in 2005 with a question that plagued him: “Why the hell can Columbia, South Carolina, have a really decent book festival and Atlanta, Georgia, cannot?”

He and Bell spent many a coffee shop strategy session brewing up “hare-brained schemes” to succeed the smaller, defunct Atlanta Book Festival.

“We knew there was a vibrant literary scene,” Bell said. “We also knew the rest of the world didn’t know it.”

It’s certainly starting to get the message now.

“They’ve done a tremendous job of building the book festival,” said Sharyn Rosenblum, senior director of media relations at William Morrow/HarperCollinsPublishers. “They’ve studied other book festivals and they’ve made it unique.”

William Morrow/HarperCollins is sending several authors to this year’s fest, confident that they’ll read to receptive audiences and be well cared for. Kaylie Jones, whose memoir, “Lies My Mother Never Told Me,” was published Tuesday, already has five interviews set up in conjunction with her appearance, and she will also appear on three panels — a serious amount of exposure for one short visit.

“Atlanta is certainly a major market,” Rosenblum said. “It’s establishing itself as one of the premier markets and festivals — it’s still young, still in its infancy.”

But growing fast. In its inaugural year, 2006, it presented 125 authors and drew an estimated 50,000. Next weekend’s festival will showcase 200 featured authors and 60 emerging authors, as well as 50 on a local prose stage and 50 on a local poetry stage.

Wang said it was important for the fest’s credibility to establish national names first and then open itself up to self-published or “hyperlocal authors.”

Atlanta poet and novelist Collin Kelley, a Poetry Atlanta board member, praises the way Wang and Bell have reached out to metro literary organizations, bookstores and writers.

“It’s absolutely amazing what they’ve accomplished in just a few years,” he said. “We’re thrilled to participate and give local poets a voice.”

Kelley, also co-director of the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival with poet Megan Volpert, was surprised and pleased when Bell approached them about coordinating an LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) “track” at this year’s Decatur fest.

The 11 tracks, groupings of programming on a particular topic or theme, such as civil rights, cooking or religion/spirituality, are a new idea to help festivalgoers get a handle on the ever-expanding schedule.

Even so, there’s way more programming beyond the tracks than included in them. Bell’s summary of highlights runs over three pages in the tabloid program guide, which maps 16 venues. Appropriately, this year’s DBF poster (along with its sharp Web site, designed by Decatur’s Lenz Inc.) depicts “Bookzilla,” a green monster with a tome for its head, taking Decatur’s square by storm.

Putting the schedule together is “like the meanest Sudoku puzzle,” Wang said. Bell starts with Post-its on a grid that eventually migrates into a database. One of the challenges he tries to resolve — an impossible one, really — is imagining the varied interests of tens of thousands of visitors and then trying to avoid programming events they’d like to see at the same time.

But he’s hardly the only festival leader who’s compulsively organized.

Nonie Ravenberg, the volunteer supervisor responsible for nine stages, oversees a crew of stage captains, stage coordination volunteers and speaker managers. The stage captain manual she compiles for each of those venues covers every scenario under the sun (last year’s Old Courthouse manual ran 14 pages).

None of Ravenberg’s charges get paid a cent, but if they did, she estimates it would cost the fest $125,000.

With a Spartan budget this year of $350,000 (including significant in-kind sponsorships), the festival would be sunk if not for its volunteer army of 538 (and counting), most recruited by Volunteer Decatur.

“This community has really embraced and owned this festival,” said Wang, who, like Bell, is a paid contractor who only works full time from the planning season through festival weekend.

The two are always pleased, and a little amused, when they get feedback from authors and publishers that theirs is one of the country’s best-run festivals.

“There’s always chaos behind the scenes,” Bell said. “We won’t pretend.”

Small wonder, though, since the festival keeps adding authors as well as events that are perhaps more on the “funnel cake” side than the literary side. This year, for instance, tractors will roar up Clairemont Avenue in a children’s parade celebrating the new kids book “Otis the Tractor.” The Southern Foodways Alliance sponsors a Sunday picnic including a pickled okra contest. And there will be a “Literary Death Match” between author/provacateur Michael Muhammad Knight and his hero, legendary 60-something Atlanta wrestler Abdullah the Butcher. The festival’s insurer hardly knew what to make of that last one.

But it sort of makes sense in the context of DBF’s Statement of Values, which begins: “In all that it does, the DBF maintains a spirit of Fun.”

“Smart fun” is how the organizers like to say it. But it does beg a question whether there can be too much of a good thing, whether there is a saturation point where the schedule exceeds festivalgoer interest.

Not at all, thinks Bell, who predicts attendance could more than double, to 150,000 in coming years.

“The thing we worry about is having enough room to put the public,” he said. “What do we think maximum capacity really is? We’re not there yet.”

Added Wang, his partner in smart fun and funnel cakes: “But we can see it.”

AJC Decatur Book Festival

Labor Day weekend, Sept. 4-6, in downtown Decatur. Free. 678-534-8526. www.decaturbookfestival.com.