“Can someone bring in the heater?!” the king shouted to no-one in particular from his wobbly wooden “throne”. He looked and sounded almost Shakespearean…
I first interviewed Richard Booth, the self-proclaimed “King Richard the Book-Hearted”, in the mid-1990s. We spoke in the grim, unheated “state rooms” of the partially restored Hay Castle, which he owned. The king’s crown, lined with brass and cotton wool, was resting on the table next to him. His moth-eaten mantle was hanging on the back of his chair. The room was chilly and unkempt. It was like sitting inside an antediluvian, yet somehow still functioning, fridge.
Richard Booth opened his first bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, then an impoverished town in the Welsh Borders, in 1961. He started by bringing in truckloads of discarded volumes from American university libraries.
For years, Booth’s efforts to turn Hay into “the book capital of the world” went unnoticed, despite proclaiming his book kingdom’s independence from the UK and appointing his horse, Caligula, the prime minister. Thousands of volumes were piled up in the town’s dark and humid cellars and inside Booth’s own messy bookshop—allegedly, the world’s largest. If you persisted, you could dig up a real bibliographic rarity there. It was like searching for gold bullion in the sand. I remember—literally—stumbling upon an old folio, with the intriguing title of Social Life of British Seaweeds, dumped on the shop’s floor. I still cannot forgive myself for not buying it then.
Well, 30-odd years on, the thriving Hay-on-Wye, with its 20 or so bookshops, is indeed the centre of the global book town movement and the venue of the UK’s most prestigious annual book festival.
Richard Booth passed away in 2019, but his bookshop—now orderly and spotless, with all books carefully catalogued and neatly positioned on the shelves—is still there. With the joy of an unexpected discovery gone, I now have to rely on other great bookshops, at home and abroad, for treasure hunting.
Massolit bookshop in Budapest is a cosy store-cum-cafe, with books in several European languages—a favourite haunt of students preparing for exams. The name “Massolit” has its origins in Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantasy novel The Master and Margarita, and its spirit of magic and mysticism is felt both in the shop’s Hogsmeade-style interior and in the books on sale. The title of the latest literary gem I found there speaks for itself: A Martian’s Guide to Budapest by Antal Szerb.
Île de Ré—a small island in the Atlantic Ocean, off the west coast of France—is an unlikely place for a great bookshop. And yet, I would rate la Librairie et à l’Atelier Quillet as one of the world’s best. Its books, comics and posters are in pristine condition, largely due to the in-house, open-plan restoration workshop. Customers can watch damaged books being “resuscitated” as they browse through the shop’s beautifully arranged 80,000-strong stock. One of my recent acquisitions there was the leather-bound 1880 edition of Des Vers by my favourite 19th century French writer Guy de Maupassant, who, unbeknownst to many, was also a wonderful poet.
Strand Bookstore at 828 Broadway, New York, boasts of “18 miles of books”, with its endless open-air bookshelves snaking along the street and spilling out into the side lanes. I once bought a mere dog-eared “inch” of Jay Franklin’s 1937 biography of Fiorello H La Guardia, the mayor of New York between 1934 and 1946. On the book’s dustjacket, there was a miraculously preserved sticker: “The publishers call to your attention that, owing to objections made by Mayor La Guardia, a portion of the text on pages 58 and 74 has been excised.” And indeed, the indicated pages were duly removed with scissors by an anonymous 1930s censor! Blunt censorship, it appears, existed not just in my first, Soviet, life, but during the Great Depression in the United States, too! The things you learn from old books!
David’s Bookshop in Letchworth Garden City was founded in 1963 by John Armitage, then the editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica. As well as its incredible choice of books (both new and second-hand) and music, the shop is known for the peculiar outdoor tables on wheels, modelled on the iconic foldable green boxes-cum-stalls of the Parisian bouquinistes. One of its latest inventions is a “Silent Book Club” on Friday evenings, when you can read in the company of fellow bookworms. I had the honour of launching several of my books in David’s, and the list of literary treasures I’ve acquired there could fill a small-print brochure!
Here, I have a confession to make. On more than one occasion, I have brought back from the shop’s outdoor stalls a book that I had myself read and deposited to David’s. Subconsciously, I was probably encouraged by my late friend Clive James, that famous Cantabrigian writer, poet, TV personality and bibliophile, who often bought a book he had once already owned from his favourite book stall in Cambridge’s Market Square “for the sheer pleasure of carrying it home.”
King Richard the Book-Hearted would have approved, I am sure.
