Exclusive Interview with Author James Hanning
James Hanning remembers Richard Booth, the largely forgotten Hay-on-Wye bookseller who created the idea of the “Book Town”.
James Hanning remembers Richard Booth, the largely forgotten Hay-on-Wye bookseller who created the idea of the “Book Town”. As Scotland’s National Book Town, Wigtown owes its identity and economic revival to this charismatic, shambolic yet inspirational figure. Discover Richard’s legacy at this year’s festival.
For a place with a population of around 1,000 – which has the usual quota of post offices, butchers, launderettes and so on - to have fully a dozen bookshops is a remarkable thing, but Wigtown does. And congratulations to the people who sustain that most vigorous example of local enterprise.
But the person who ultimately made it happen was a man called Richard Booth. He is largely forgotten outside the second-hand bookselling world, but not in the small Powys-Herefordshire border town of Hay-on-Wye, which is where he came up with the idea of a book town. Le Redu in the Ardennes followed suit in the 1980s and the idea took wing. In 1998 Bredevoort in the Netherlands organised a festival of book towns from all across Europe. That was the year Wigtown acquired its status as Scotland’s very own book town, and its festival was launched the following year.
From Bovines to Books
In 1962, having left Oxford with no degree and anxious to fend off his strait-laced parents’ persistent suggestions that he get a proper qualification, Richard Booth opened a shop selling books and other bits and pieces. Now Hay had no great literary tradition. Francis Kilvert, the Victorian clergyman, had kept a diary while living in the area, but the town’s leanings were almost entirely agricultural. Sheep and cattle would be driven down the high street. People would come into market on a Thursday, but they certainly weren’t coming to buy books. The railway line that ran from Hereford to Brecon had just been closed by Dr Beeching. It was, it seemed, destined to be sleepier than ever. Yet that shop was within 15 years the largest second-hand bookshop in the world, bringing in other booksellers and attracting bookbuyers from across the globe. Hay at one time had forty bookshops. He put Hay on the map.
It was largely force of personality – a highly eccentric one - and extraordinary hard work. He just got inspired by the dream of being a place where people could come and browse and pay bargain prices for serendipitous purchases. And to that end he would launch himself on feverish buying trips to increase his stock, getting up at 4am and go round South Wales, where many of the miners’ libraries were closing, and then travel much further afield, throughout the UK and beyond, to the US, Canada, Australia and the Far East.
Not Snobbery, Just Practicality...
Close to home, in the quest for stock he would instruct employees not to waste their time approaching houses unlikely to have a decent collection. Only a certain sort of well-to-do person would be worth trying. So, he told them to approach only detached houses with names rather than street numbers. And don’t bother with houses with electrically-lit doorbells, he said. This was not snobbery, just practicality. He would scour the “Deaths” columns of the newspapers, wait a few weeks and then either write a sympathetic letter or “drop by” in the that sufficient time had passed for the grieving widow to realise she needed to get rid of some of his books.
He opened countless subsidiary shops. He spent hours in the local pubs, buying drinks for his staff and the locals. He bought a disused cinema and had miles of shelves installed. He ranted at length about the inequities of how local government grants were awarded, yet was happy to accept them himself. He would hire and fire at whim, often forgetting who he had hired and fired.
Heroically Bad Businessman
He showed many of the attributes of a successful businessman – drive, a vision, a capacity for hard work, charisma, imagination, a willingness to take risks – but don’t let that mislead you. He was a heroically bad businessman. His bookkeeping was shambolic. New faces would appear in Hay. When asked, they would say “I’m Richard’s new financial controller.” People would look away in pity, with a “you won’t last long” expression. Within weeks they would be gone. One former employee described working for him as like being part of the unfolding drama of a surrealist novel.
On occasions he would pay far too much for a collection. Sometimes he didn’t pay at all, so poor was his cash-flow. He did what one expert in antiquarian books described as “the best book deal any dealer has ever done” yet he let the contents slip through his fingers, through inattention and a failure to appreciate what he had bought.
An Extraordinary Vision
And yet… he invented the concept of the book town. Hay is now world-famous because of Booth, and I am delighted to say that Wigtown is a beneficiary of his extraordinary vision.
If you would like to know more about the most extraordinary man I have ever encountered, about how he married three times, ditching one wife at the altar, about the glamorous coterie he attracted to Hay (including Marianne Faithfull), about how he crowned himself King and led Hay to independence from England and Wales, his dealings with the mob in the US, how he was accused of burning down his own castle, how his driving killed one of his passengers, how he tried to scupper the Hay Festival, how his benign, patrician spirit led him to turn a blind eye to thieving by his own staff, do come along to hear about this remarkable man at the Wigtown Festival on 28 September. You can book your tickets online.
The PDF of the 2025 Wigtown Book Festival programme can be downloaded here, or book your tickets online.