‘A breathtakingly hilarious and absorbing portrait of one of the most brilliant, dotty, dippy delirious yet ultimately inspiring eccentrics in British history . . . A remarkable story of cultural life, friendship, obsession and passion’ Stephen Fry
‘Brilliantly evocative, like listening to the gossip of ghosts’ Bruce Robinson
‘The Bookseller of Hay is the very model of a biography which amazes, occasionally horrifies and entirely engrosses . . . James Hanning is a writer of sublime insight, style and skill Horatio Clare
‘What you have to understand is that Richard Booth was completely mad’ Marianne Faithfull
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.
‘Brilliantly evocative, like listening to the gossip of ghosts’ Bruce Robinson
‘The Bookseller of Hay is the very model of a biography which amazes, occasionally horrifies and entirely engrosses . . . James Hanning is a writer of sublime insight, style and skill Horatio Clare
‘What you have to understand is that Richard Booth was completely mad’ Marianne Faithfull
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.
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Reviews
Hanning's book is fascinating and is full of larger-than-life characters
What you have to understand is that Richard Booth was completely mad
Wonderful and astute... The Bookseller of Hay will, I have no doubt, make a classic, rollicking, award-winning film... Had I the loot, I'd snap up the rights instantly
The Bookseller of Hay is the very model of a biography which amazes, occasionally horrifies and entirely engrosses . . . James Hanning is a writer of sublime insight, style and skill
In an age of tedious homogeneity, The Bookseller of Hay unabashedly flicks two fingers... Hanning deals deftly with it all, overcoming the intricacies of local chatter to provide an amusingly universal tale
Brilliantly evocative, like listening to the gossip of ghosts
A breathtakingly hilarious and absorbing portrait of one of the most brilliant, dotty, dippy delirious yet ultimately inspiring eccentrics in British history. In its depiction of Richard Booth's monomaniacal creation of the Hay-on-Wye that the world knows and celebrates to today as the Town of Books and home of the great literary festival, this terrific book would be fascinating enough. But somehow the telling of it all contrives to add up to more than the sum of those parts alone and emerges as a remarkable story of cultural life, friendship, obsession and passion
Meticulously researched... The Bookseller Of Hay really captures the 1960s-70s heyday of Booth's reign