The Magus of Hay(10)

This bungalow – Robin despised it – was attached to another one and built on an estate near Kington, fifteen or so miles from Hay. Pink-brick suburbia made all the worse for having empty hills tantalizingly on the horizon.

After supper, the sky reddening, they lit a fire in the small woodstove they’d installed to save on oil, and Betty sat on the rug near the legs of Robin’s chair and felt the excitement around him like ground mist.

‘See, this guy… a legitimate hero.’

‘Another one?’

‘This is the real thing,’ Robin said. ‘This matters.’

He hadn’t been sure if the man he’d talked to in the King of Hay shop – older than the man on the front of the book – had actually been the King of Hay and hadn’t dared ask. Robin was strangely shy with people he thought he might admire. But now he was halfway into the autobiography and sure on both counts.

‘I just didn’t know the half of this. You hear about the King, you think it’s a pisstake. Which, OK it was. Until it became majorly serious.’

He stared into the stove, the flames still yellow. Robin saw the stove as an essential energy source, like all the books on their shelves, soon to be turned into a different kind of energy.



Betty thought the King of Hay had just looked like some overweight, ageing bloke, detecting no obvious charisma, but…

‘OK… tell me.’

Richard Booth – later Richard Coeur de Livres – had grown up at Cusop, the strung-out village just on the English side of Hay. Back in the early 1960s, when Hay was a run-down farmers’ town, sinking into an economic ditch, he’d bought the old town fire station for seven-hundred pounds, opening an antique shop there.

‘But his business took off,’ Robin said. ‘Like really took off… when he switched to second-hand books.’

Booth loved books and books seemed to love Booth, and it was a slow explosion. In the years that followed, he opened bookstore after bookstore, building the town an international reputation as the place where you could find a book on anything you wanted, without paying through the nose.

Other book dealers moved in, and Booth bought the castle – part medieval, part mansion house, Jacobean through to Victorian – which also got filled up with books. Pretty soon, Hay had became a unique town with a whole new economic basis, a level of self-sufficiency unknown, not only in these parts, but anywhere in the UK.

‘Books had become like the currency of Hay.’

‘Well, yes,’ Betty said. ‘That’s nice, but—’

‘Nice? It was magic! And not in a pretentious way, because he wasn’t some nose-in-air, asshole-scholar type. At one stage, the books that nobody wanted, he even sold them as fuel… for burning?’

‘Would Mr Oliver be happy about that, you think?’

‘Oliver didn’t fit. Kapoor said that. Oliver was too Establishment. Booth’s Hay was outside all of that. He’d kick-started the economy of a town that was stagnating, and it was pulling visitors again – book tourists. OK, in a small way at first. Calls it trickle-tourism. The town doesn’t get swamped, it just builds steadily. But then the big guys get interested – the national chains, the Welsh development agencies, the Wales Tourist Board. Offering the kind of big money grants which your average entrepreneurs just grab and run with, milk the agencies for all they can get then move on when the grants dry up. But that…’

Robin was on the edge of his chair cushion, his hair in spikes.

‘…was precisely what Booth did not do. Sees these agency guys with their chequebooks and their government support and their big shit-eating smiles, and he’s like, FUCK OFF!’

Betty grinned. It was at times like this that Robin was able to forget his smashed pelvis, his wonky spine. She laid her head against his knees as he described how, as part of a battle to keep the town entirely local, beat off the national chains and the government agencies, Richard Booth and his supporters had decided that Hay, this ancient once-walled town which sat right on the border of Wales and England, should declare itself independent of both.

And that he should be its king.

Sure, it had started out as a kind of joke. There were Hay passports and HAY car-plates, and King Richard was bestowing honours on supporters, giving them Hay titles. Attracting the kind of free worldwide publicity that his powerful enemies on the tourist and development boards would’ve had to pay out millions for.

A sharp elbow in the ribs of the Establishment. A defiant finger in the face of the organized politics.

‘Guy’s a goddamn genius.’

Building on the fame, a father and son team from a neigh-bouring village, Norman and Peter Florence, had started a small festival of literature which, at first, Richard Booth opposed on the basis that it was promoting new rather than second-hand books. But within a few years – because things happened here – it was pulling in the best part of a hundred thousand people to hear the world’s greatest writers and thinkers. Finally winning Booth’s blessing around the time Bill Clinton had arrived in a smoke-glassed limo to address the world from a huge marquee in the grounds of Hay Castle, calling the festival the Woodstock of the Mind.