The Bookseller of Hay: The Life and Times of Richard Booth

In 1962, a young man left university without a degree and, for want of anything better to do, bought a small shop in an obscure market town on the edge of the Brecon Beacons. Within fifteen years, largely through force of personality, Richard Booth had created the world's largest second-hand bookshop, attracting thousands of visitors from across the globe to Hay-on-Wye, on the Welsh border.

The Bookseller of Hay tells the tale of an extraordinary, chaotic man, a true British eccentric, who invented the term 'book town', attracted a coterie of exotic and illustrious followers, crowned himself king, declared the town's independence and provided the bookish backdrop which - to his frustration - allowed a rival attraction, the now world-famous Hay Festival, to flourish.

It is a story of the extraordinary singlemindedness of a hard-working, hard-playing and rebellious son of privilege, inspired by a romantic vision and a deep love of the area, of a man better suited to publicity than bean-counting who launched countless careers but whose business instincts undermined precisely what had brought success. Booth was a deeply divisive figure, but love him or hate him, all agree on one thing. He put Hay on the map.

James Hanning, a frequent visitor to Hay since the 1960s, has interviewed dozens of local people and booksellers and with typical acuity wonderfully captures this bygone era of eccentricity and excess.

Richard Booth was a divisive figure.

Beyond the briefest of encounters in the street, I never really met him.

What follows is based on written material and the recollections of others. And among those, often there is little consensus. To some he was a benign, paternal, swashbuckling advocate for what his father's generation would have called 'the common man'. To others he was a shambolic, egotistical, capricious, unreliable spendthrift.

If the reader is able to draw more settled conclusions than I am about a highly idiosyncratic figure, I am delighted.

Without Booth, Hay would be just another border town. His influence remains immense, and his story
worth telling.