Richard Booth
‘King of Hay-on-wye’ whose flair for publicity turned a Welsh town into the world capital of books
RICHARD BOOTH, who has died aged 80, was a prominent second-hand bookseller and the self-styled King of Hay-on-wye. It was largely thanks to Booth’s energy and taste for self-publicity that Hay-on-wye was transformed from an ailing market town on the Welsh border into a centre for the secondhand book trade that attracts tourists from across the world.
Arriving in Hay in 1961, Booth invested money from a legacy in a string of abandoned premises, including a cinema, which he filled with books purchased by the lorryload.
Though Booth had acquired an (indifferent) Oxford degree, he was no advocate of education. Among his many eccentric views was the belief that the state had convinced rural children that it was ignoble to work with one’s hands and had created a partially educated generation “only fit for jobs in local government”.
Booth pioneered the selling of books as commodities irrespective of their content. “A book is something to carry, not to read,” he said. “That will be my contribution to the human race.”
Travelling the world in some style, he bought up whole libraries of books. Hay, the “Town of Books”, overflowed with volumes in every language and on every subject.
Martin Amis once came across 20 copies of a monograph on “The Indian Dog”, while The Daily Telegraph’s Sam Llewellyn recalled being shown 10,000 copies of “HM Ploughing Regulations for Bengal for 1948”. “Even a bad book about the First World War has a buyer somewhere,” said Booth.
Owing to Booth’s success in publicising the town, the Hay secondhand book acquired the status of a souvenir. Tourists brought books as they might have brought clotted cream in Devon.
Referring to books as “wallpaper” Booth furnished libraries for Americans with books selected for their binding. In the early 1980s he outraged bibliophiles by selling books off by the carload for home burning.
He was always as interested in promulgating his ideas as in selling books. The crux of his philosophy was a terror of bureaucracy, which he claimed was in the pockets of big business and had stripped the countryside of local jobs and local products.
“If you’re from a small town and only have one O-level,” he said, “you’ll stay in that small town. Which is why so many Welsh towns are run by stupid people.”
Booth served briefly on the council, but it was not a happy time and he was constantly thwarted in his search for temporal power.
On April Fool’s Day 1977, Booth declared Hay independent and had himself crowned King Richard Coeur de Livre. After a coronation ceremony at the town’s Norman castle – which he had bought – he went on a walkabout with his consort, “Duchess of Hay and Offa’s Dyke”, the transsexual model April Ashley, and, in some accounts, appointed his horse Prime Minister.
There was a fly-past by a biplane of the Hay air force and a rowing boat was launched as the first ship of the Hay navy. The party then adjourned to
the pub, where Hay passports and Hay edible currency went on sale and the King dispensed cabinet posts.
“The enormous advantage of Hay,” observed Booth, “is that it is possible to give almost everyone a top government or civil service job. Someone who you met in a pub could five minutes later become home secretary. The minister for social security (having the advantage of being on the dole for six years) was appointed in a second.”
“If I can change,” asked April Ashley, “why can’t Hay?”
An Army officer’s son, Richard George William Pitt Booth was born on September 12 1938 and educated at Rugby and Oxford.
“My father liked to browse in second-hand book shops,” he recalled. “I went with him.” After considering a career as a lawyer, and a three-week stint as an accountant, Booth decided on the selling of books and moved to Hay after he and his sisters were left a large house outside the town by a bachelor uncle.
At one time Booth owned at least half a dozen outlets in Hay. But he was obliged to sell several off to meet debts. Dubbed “Bokassa” by Private Eye, Booth had a reputation for great generosity and fits of imperial excess. So bad was his reputation for managing money that in the 1970s Hay Booksellers Association took out a trade advert saying: “We have no connection with Richard Booth. We pay promptly.”
It was said that everybody in Hay had worked for Booth at some time and most had also been laid off. Many former employees also went into the book trade. By 1998 Hay supported 35 book shops and was also a centre for antiques and crafts.
The first Hay literary festival, founded by Peter Florence and his parents the actors Norman Florence and Rhoda Lewis, took place in 1988. (“Hay-on-wye?” Arthur Miller inquired when asked to appear early on. “Is that some kind of a sandwich?”)
In 1991 the festival sold more than 20,000 tickets: Booth responded by handing out badges that read “Say No to the Rent-a-literati”. He also continued his outspoken attacks on supermarkets, the council, the Welsh Development Board and Tourist Authority, breeze blocks, the despoliation of Cusop Dingle, public lavatories, advertising and weekenders.
Claiming to be a friend of Arthur Scargill, he even stood as a candidate for the Socialist Labour Party in the 1999 Welsh Assembly elections (and for Wales constituency at the 2009 European Parliament election). “The only way to revive the rural economy is to bring back animals and peasants, not make phoney publicity stories about job opportunities,” he declared.
Though his claims of wholesale corruption were taken with a pinch of salt, it was acknowledged that much of what he said was insightful and at times prophetic. “Local culture will attract tourists,” he wrote. “Tourist culture will ultimately drive them away.”
In latter years, when he had only two bookshops in Hay, Booth ran a consultancy to help other towns establish themselves in the secondhand book trade. Sceptics alleged that this was a typical Booth scheme to dispose of the many unsaleable volumes he had in stock.
In 1996 he had an operation to remove a benign brain tumour, which left him faintly paralysed, a vast shambling figure with a twisted face. He lost none of his energy, though, or his venom for his many and various enemies.
“Democracy has gone,” he said. “Democracy has gone. When Democracy has gone you will get violence.”
Two years later, on April 4 1998, he celebrated 21 years of his “reign” with a street party and fireworks in his honour organised by his subjects.
In 1999 he published his autobiography, My Kingdom of Books (written with his stepdaughter Lucia Stuart).
On April Fool’s Day 2000, he held an investiture of “The Hay House of Lords” and created 21 new “hereditary” peers. His recreations in Who’s Who were listed as “Creating a monarchy in Hay because democracy has vanished and the divine right of kings is an effective opposition to the divine right of the officials, gardening.”
In August 2005, Richard Booth announced that he was selling his last remaining Hay bookshop and moving to Germany, blaming high costs and “unelected bureaucrats” in the Welsh Assembly “who have killed off democracy”. The bookshop was sold, but Booth stayed put, though in 2011 he sold Hay’s castle and moved to a large family house at Cusop, near Hay.
In 2004 he was appointed MBE for his services to tourism in Powys and in 2014, in association with the Hay Writers’ Circle, gave his name to an annual award for Non-fiction.
Both was three times married. His first wife was said to have taken the advice of her mother and left him after a year. On the second occasion he claimed to have realised his mistake after just 24 hours.
In 1987, however, he married, thirdly, Hope Stuart (née Barrie), a former freelance photographer, who survives him.
Richard Booth, born September 12 1938, died August 20 2019