78 The EconomistAugust 31st 2019
I
f you werepresented with a town like Hay-on-Wye—a sand-
stone cluster of some 2,000 souls guarded by a Norman castle,
cradled in green Welsh hills and watered by the loveliest river in
Britain—and were told to revive its fading economy, you might not
think of a second-hand bookshop. The entrepreneurial flame sel-
dom burns bright there. Outside, a few shelves open to the weather
tempt you with Proceedings of the 1957 Plumbers’ Conventionand
“Turnips for Fun and Profit”. Inside the stock is haphazard, unal-
phabetical, and sometimes in piles on the floor. Beside the till, an
intellectual ancient in tweed jacket or cardigan, roughly according
to sex, sits sunk in such slumbrous appreciation of a volume from
the stock that they do not stir either to wish you good day when you
enter, or say goodbye when you leave.
Richard Booth overturned all that. He swept into Hay in 1961,
fresh down from Oxford, flush with inherited money from Yard-
ley’s soap and toilet water and sparkling with visionary schemes.
First he bought the dilapidated old fire station in Lion Street and
filled it with books. He did the same with the old cinema, then two
premises on the high street, until he had opened 20, and the origi-
nal shop had become, by his estimate, the biggest second-hand
bookshop in the world. Many of his employees went on to start
bookshops of their own, until the town had almost 40. Encouraged
by this bonanza the Hay Festival of Literature started up in 1988,
drawing up to 250,000 visitors for ten days every year. Little Hay
was now world-famous. In 1999 the University of Strathclyde re-
ported that, since Mr Booth and the books arrived, not only had the
town boomed but, on the back of that, Wales had.
Odd, then, that Hay’s saviour did not care that much for books.
His father liked browsing, and as a boy he had tagged along, but
those dusty tomes might have been vegetables or shoes as far as he
was concerned. You could carry them about, and use them as wall-
paper; he was happy to choose books for the libraries of rich Amer-icans simply for their bindings, not for anything inside. Books
were something he could sell, piling high and flogging cheap, and
the more outlets he had in a place, the more people would come. So
with several strong men from Hay he toured America and the Eng-
lish-speaking world, buying whole libraries, until his shops were
so stuffed that in the 1980s, to the horror of those who did care, he
was offering books as kindling at £1.50 a car-boot-load. One fam-
ous visiting writer counted 20 copies of “The Indian Dog” in the
main shop. No matter; Mr Booth reasoned that any book at all
might have a buyer waiting somewhere.
And books were a means to his glorious end: to make his home
town stand proudly on its own two feet, freed from the shackles of
the useless town council, the Welsh Tourist Board and the quangos
of the Development Board for Rural Wales. Government bureau-
crats had no idea how to make a town like Hay thrive. Everything
they came up with—chain motels employing the slave-labour of
the locals, theme parks, supermarkets selling them bad bland
food—stripped away the distinctiveness of the place. Local voices
went unheard. The answer was to give the town back to the talents
and good sense of its citizens, and books were just the start. He al-
ready lived in the half-ruined castle, knocked about a bit by both
bad King John and Owen Glyndwr, and parked his Rolls-Royce out-
side, so the next move came naturally. In 1977, when 20 journalists
were in town—searching for the pop star Marianne Faithfull, not
for him—he seceded from Britain in a Unilateral Declaration of In-
dependence and crowned himself king.
Coverage was immense. The national press relayed his trium-
phal entry into the town, clad in a tin-foil crown and ermine cloak
and bearing his regalia of gilded ballcock and copper piping, while
the biplane of the Hay air force did a flypast and the rowing boat of
the Hay navy went down the Wye, firing blanks through a drain-
pipe. After a three-minute speech, in which he hoped that “Hay
potage” and “the Hay loaf” would become real, not theoretical, he
raised the flag of independence, the green and white of Wales with
the black Booth arms, to the cheers of 20,000 people.
His demeanour was royal, right down to fits of royal pique; yet
he was not a monarchist. He invoked the divine right of kings only
as a perfect foil to the divine right claimed by officialdom. Demo-
cracy was his real love, as his rule showed. Almost everyone in
town could have a post in his government. His drinking pals from
The Rose and Crown made up his cabinet; the minister for social
security had been on the dole for six years. He sold titles to anyone
who fancied being a duke, an earl or a Polish count. His subjects
were also decorated at random: two small boys in the crowd at his
coronation were knighted, and a woman was declared queen of her
street, receiving a gold-dipped flower. Every month the back room
at The Swan became the Royal University of Cusop Dingle, dedicat-
ed to topics cruelly ignored by the rest of academia. In this centre
of learning, anyone could be a professor.
What with the books and its giddy freedom, Hay now thrived,
becoming a model of revival for failing rural towns the world over,
from Nebraska to South Korea. Its king was delighted by that,
though he himself rose and fell, going bust at one point (he was
hopeless with money), failing to win a seat in the Welsh Assembly
and, by 2007, selling all his shops. He gained enemies as well as
friends, and in 2009 was executed in effigy in the old Butter Market
by a rival bookseller, who set up a Commonwealth.
Nor did he ever embrace the Festival, which to him was a piece
of Murdochite sponsorship which brought crowds for a while but
did not sustain the town month in, month out. Worse, it celebrated
new books, a million words of mumbo-jumbo nonsense. He
dreamed of a polisof creative citizens working nobly with their
hands, fed by cheery peasants from the green surrounding hills
who brought in ungraded eggs and home-cured bacon, unbound
by fussy regulations. Whether they read or not—whether they
could read or not—mattered less than that the bureaucrats were
felled at last, clobbered by 20 copies of “The Indian Dog”. 7Richard Booth, bookseller and King of Hay, died on August
20th, aged 80A saviour in ermine
Obituary Richard Booth