Bookseller with a f lair for publicity put Hay-on-Wye on the world’s literary map
Long before the Hay festival began drawing the literati to a small bucolic market town at the foot of the Black Mountains in Wales, Richard Booth was selling books there. From Hay Castle, a crumbling Norman pile looming over the town, the self-styled and idiosyncratic King Richard Coeur de Livre (Bookheart) reigned over what became the biggest centre in the world for second-hand books.
On April Fool’s Day 1977 he declared the town’s independence, printing Hay passports and issuing banknotes. There was even a national sausage, while Goldie, his horse, was appointed prime minister. ‘‘I bent over backwards to get publicity,’’ said
Booth, who relished both his drink and his status as a bibliophile celebrity.
Edible currency was an early innovation, printed on rice paper so people could put their money where their mouth was.
To demonstrate his visceral hatred of the Welsh tourist board and all those he considered to be meddlers, he erected a monstrous 10-metre-high bureaucrat to be burnt on Guy Fawkes Night. A Hay patriotic machine was built: put 10p in the slot and you could hear a rendition of the Hay national anthem as a portrait appeared of King Richard with flashing eyes. The sale of Hayon-Wye dukedoms (£25), earldoms (£15) and baronetcies (£5) were said to exceed the number sold by James I, Charles I and David Lloyd George combined.
Weary from trying to defend an empire in decline, the British chose not to contest Hay’s secession and the town became a free state – at least in the mind of its philosopher king, whose crown was created from tin foil, and whose orb and sceptre were made from a discarded toilet cistern.
The arrival in 1988 of the Hay festival, with its A-list names and corporate sponsorship, was in stark contrast to the obscure, arcane and dusty world of books that Booth inhabited and drew his wrath, even though he had helped to create the conditions in which it was to flourish. The festival, he argued, was exploiting the town’s reputation as a secondhand book centre while ignoring the traders who had put it on the map. During one early festival he decorated the castle with a neon sign that read ‘‘arts’’ with a flashing ‘‘f’’ before it. ‘‘If anyone objects I’ll tell them it stands for fine arts,’’ he declared.
Richard George William Pitt Booth was born in Hay to a mother whose family name was Pitt. He claimed to be descended from William Pitt the Younger. He was educated at Rugby School, but left in disgrace after being caught cheating. He read history at Oxford and, at his parents’ behest, joined an accountancy firm for three weeks. It was not his strongest suit, as his many creditors would later attest.
Despite his privileged schooling, Booth
During one early festival he decorated the castle with a neon sign that read ‘‘arts’’ with a flashing ‘‘f’’ before it. ‘‘If anyone objects I’ll tell them it stands for fine arts,’’ he declared.
Richard Booth, left
was sceptical about education, arguing that it disadvantaged rural areas. ‘‘If you’re from a small town and only have one O level, you’ll stay in that small town,’’ he said, arguing that the brighter people left and never returned. ‘‘Which is why so many Welsh towns are run by stupid people.’’
He opened his first bookshop in 1961, and bought premises around the town that he filled with thousands of books no-one else wanted, including entire libraries shipped from the US. ‘‘Even a bad book about the First World War has a buyer somewhere,’’ he said.
He recalled the mayor at the time saying that his business ventures would not last six months. By the start of the 1970s his business was successful enough for him to have a Rolls Royce Phantom V parked outside his castle. In 2011, with Booth in declining health, the castle was sold to a trust and its king retired to a large house nearby.
He was adamant that he never wanted children, and in his early 20s had a vasectomy. He was generous with his
affections, however, and claimed to have had an affair with Marianne Faithfull, while a mysterious Kentucky heiress once saved him from bankruptcy. An early marriage lasted a year. His second, in 1977, to Victoria del Rio, a Spaniard from a wealthy family in the Canary Islands whom he had known from university, was even shorter. ‘‘She was heavily into the hippy thing, which I wanted no part of,’’ he said, admitting he realised his mistake after only a few days. Victoria hit back: ‘‘He’s put me in exile because I would not join in sex orgies with women and pop stars at his castle. He promised I would be a queen, but I finished up washing dishes in a cafe.’’
His third marriage, in 1987, was to Hope Stuart, a photographer, who survives him. His stepdaughter, Lucia Stuart, helped with the production of My Kingdom of Books ,a colourful memoir published in 1999. By then a brain tumour had been removed, leaving him slightly disabled, and later he had a stroke.
Booth certainly looked the part of a minor European monarch. He was podgy and balding, with dandruff-covered shoulders on his sagging suits; big rectangular glasses fell down his nose. Merely the mention of his name is still enough to spark an animated discussion in the town’s pubs. At various times the council and the local booksellers’ association felt obliged to dissociate themselves from his antics.
Claiming to be a friend of miners’ union leader Arthur Scargill, he stood for the Socialist Labour Party in the 1999 Welsh Assembly elections, and at the 2009 elections to the European parliament, but attracted less than 2 per cent of the vote.
Today Hay-on-Wye is renowned as the used-book capital of the world. Booth’s shop was sold about 10 years ago but continues to trade as Richard Booth’s Bookshop.
As for Booth, he had greater ambitions than Hay. He created the concept of the ‘‘book town’’, which led to more than 20 others around the world, and in 1998 promoted himself to ‘‘Emperor of all the world’s book towns’’. The occasion was celebrated with jugglers, stilt walkers, buskers and mime artists, while the main procession was headed by an ambling band rather than a marching band. – The Times