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By the late
1970s Hay had become the first book town and was said to contain over
a million books. The town quickly achieved national and international
fame which was partly due to the novelty of the book town concept,
but equally to Booth's flamboyant personality and the spectacular,
highly publicised run-ins he managed to engineer with government bureaucracies.
On April
1st 1977 he declared "Home
Rule for Hay"
and appointed himself King. This started as an off-the- cuff joke
but was taken so seriously by local councillors and the media, that
Booth decided to develop the idea into a printed manifesto, "Independence
for Hay", empowering himself to anoint Titles upon select people, such as Duke, Duchess etc.
The stunt achieved world- wide publicity. For many years Hay was
seen as an eccentric book town and nothing more, but in the early
1990s, as similar ventures were copied in France, Belgium and the
Netherlands, the Scottish Tourism Research Unit at the University of
Strathclyde, initiated a project, supported by Scottish Enterprise,
to investigate their economic effects in peripheral rural areas. The
first research report showed how the growth of Hay as a book town had
had an astonishing economic effect on its region, and to some extent
on Wales as a whole.
Richard
Booth's main bookshop is at 44 Lion Street (the largest bookshop in
Hay) which he concentrates on and which has a turnover of more
secondhand books than any other secondhand bookshop in the world. He
would now like to see many small specialist bookshops in Hay, with
the Proprietor as the expert on the subject in which he deals. To
ensure this ideal, his wife started the smaller specialist bookshop
at Hay Castle selling books on American Indians, Film, Photography,
Transport, Crafts Art and Architecture. He and his wife are planning
to rebuild Hay Castle as the book specialist centre of the world.
Seeing that
a good idea - bringing in lots of publicity - works, many of the
people who had worked for him have opened their own bookshops in Hay:
Hay Prints, Kemeys Forwood, Castle Street Books, Derek Addyman, Andy
Cooke etc., were all trained by him.
From vast
libraries in Danish Castles, to Belgian Chateaux, to American
colleges, the wide ranging international sources of secondhand books
in the town gives good reason for the customer to come to Hay.
"You
buy books from all over the world and your customers come from all
over the world" was Richard Booth's idea and it worked.
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