Which is a lovely story. Of course, as with all the signings, there were a handful of goths, just as there were a handful of people with beards and a handful of people in expensive suits. Most of the people in the audience who I met in the signing line (which was the longest one at the Edinburgh Book Festival) were utterly indistinguishable from the people in the signing line that followed (it was Iain Banks's).
But as the reporter says, he wasn't there, and the tale obviously grew in the telling. And "guy you've never heard of gets more people in his book-signing line than anyone else" is much less anecdotally interesting than "Charlotte Square Covered by Menacing People in Black".