James Hanning

This book seeks to discover the real Richard Booth, who is seen in a remarkable number of guises by friend and foe. Most striking is how opinions of Booth contradict one another. Former girlfriends call the thrice-married Booth a deeply sensitive, thwarted romantic, while former colleagues howl with laughter at the suggestion, calling him a promiscuous, sex-mad monster. Was he an out-of-control boozer or an outgoing and generous charmer? Was he ultra-competitive in the company of others, or a generous-spirited patron of the arts who wanted above all to encourage the talents of others? The chronicle of how Hay became famous has never been written. Recent books on the place have been guide books, rather than portraits of Hay''s idiosyncrasies. Nor has anyone catalogued the day-to-day folly of the early Booth years, a true Alice in Wonderland adventure of excess and financial incontinence. Booth''s autobiography, largely penned for him by his step-daughter, is a readable but highly partial version of events.

'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 FaithfullIn 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.