It isn’t often a single topic will stretch into two blog posts, but Hay-on-Wye is such a rich source of goodies for booklovers that I could probably keep going for a month or two.
The town itself has been on the edge of my consciousness since I was a small child, being driven from my family’s new north of England home on our annual visit back to our roots in south Wales, though in those far-off days it was just a point along the route. It wasn’t until the 1970s that it began to transform itself into the almost magical place it is today. The Harry Potter franchise could almost have filmed the Hogsmeade scenes there: tumbledown castle on a hillside; small winding streets, some of which barely accommodate a bike, much less a car; a real old-fashioned weekly street market; not a chainstore sign in sight; and above all, bookshops, bookshops and more bookshops. You kind of expect to press on a certain stone in a certain wall and watch the whole place transform into a literary Diagon Alley – though it’s not far from being exactly that as it stands.
I made my first real visit in the early 1990s, when the annual Hay Literary Festival was well established, but a long way from the huge international event it has now become. By then the town was already famous as the UK’s first book town, and we didn’t have to walk far to see why. There were, and still are, secondhand bookshops on every corner, every twisty lane, with half a dozen on every street. Even the castle has shelves of tatty paperbacks and an honesty box in the courtyard.
It’s a bookaholic’s paradise. But after that almost-first time, I didn’t go back for nearly twenty years. I have no idea why: life had other plans, and the occasion didn’t present itself, I suppose. But in more recent years, nostalgia for the place she grew up has taken root in my elderly mother, and we’ve begun to make annual visits to the few relations who still live in the Welsh village she moved to when she married my father...
Sorry, too much information; let’s get back to the books. The second time we made the journey, we saw the sign for Hay-on-Wye and detoured down a narrow country lane. It was like an addict’s first fix: I was hooked. There wasn’t much time to explore, but I still came out with a bagful of the kind of books that conventional bookshops can’t find any more.
And now, whenever Mother wants to wander down Memory Lane, and at any other time I can find a good excuse, I make the journey, feed that addiction, explore those narrow streets and fill my canvas shopping bags (which were once giveaway book bags at another book festival) all over again.
This time, just a couple of weeks ago, I discovered Murder and Mayhem. It’s easy to find new ones every time, but can you believe I’d never discovered the one that actually specializes in crime fiction before? Hard, isn’t it? We tried out another shop we hadn’t previously visited, and were disappointed to find it had no dedicated crime section as the big general shops all do. We enquired at the paydesk – and were directed across the road. The reason there was no crime section was that they had a whole shopful instead!
And there they were. Rows and rows of them, on shelves, on tables, on the stairs, piled on the floor. We’d already visited two of our favourite shops, and carried a bagful of treasures back to the car park – but come on, guys, I’m a bookaholic. Suffice to say I still don’t know how I fitted them all on the shelves when we got home; I need to give serious thought to creating a few more yards of to-be-read space. And we’ll be going back, make no mistake.
If you’ve been to Hay-on-Wye, you probably allowed your attention to wander elsewhere after my opening sentence. If you haven’t, and I’ve whetted your appetite and piqued your imagination, my work here for today is done. And I didn’t even tell you about the patisserie stall in the food market...
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