Ask a librarian to describe heaven on earth and I’m certain that books will figure prominently in the vision. I’m married to one, so I posed the question to Cheryl. She began to dreamily describe being in a place where you could walk down any street and pass one bookstore after another, each with rows upon rows of books stacked floor to ceiling. And they would be inexpensive to buy. (She’s not looking for free handouts in heaven.) In fact, you wouldn’t even have to bother entering a store, because the streets would be lined with outdoor shelves of old books, with boxes every few feet to just drop a few coins in to pay for your purchase. There would be a wealth of cafes and pubs where you could take breaks and sit for hours reading.
Just such a heaven on earth actually exists, and we spent a long weekend there. It is the “book town” of Hay-on-Wye, near the Wales/England border. This village of 1300 residents has 39 new and used bookshops, ranging from small intimate shops to cavernous ones like the Cinema Bookstore, so named because it fills a former movie theater. There are rare bookshops and “Every Book for Two Pounds” stores. Charming bed & breakfasts, inns, pubs and restaurants fill the town center. There are rows of outside shelves filled with musty old hardbacks, each for 50 pence, and “honour boxes” for payment. Each summer over 80,000 literary enthusiasts flock to Hay-on-Wye for its international festival.
It is touristy, but many visitors are day trippers who board their tour buses and return home at the end of the day, leaving the place peaceful and quiet in the evenings. That is, except where we stayed. We chose a B&B right off the main square to be near the action, but we failed to notice the town clock tower, 150 feet out our second story bedroom window, whose bells tolled every quarter hour, 24 hours a day. Large clanging bells are charming at three in the afternoon but alarming at three in the morning. We were there three nights, the first of which was relatively sleepless, since each time we dozed off we were jarred back to heart-pounding wakefulness every 15 minutes. (This was summer and hot, so closing the window was out of the question.) By the third night we had adjusted to the point where we were aware of the gonging in some state of sleep/consciousness, but I don’t think we ever approached REM sleep. To add to the restless nights, our room was above the main town-to-farm road, the route of a daily 5:00 AM parade of monster tractors heading out to the fields. The upside to the central location was that we could browse, buy, and dump our books easily before heading out for more treasure hunting, although it cost us a lot of money for excess baggage weight for the return flight.
How did this remote and economically depressed medieval market town in Wales become an internationally famous book town? In 1961 an eccentric and flamboyant businessman by the name of Richard Booth, whose family had lived in the Hay area for decades, took possession of the thirteenth-century Norman castle in town and also opened a used bookshop. He saw the potential of revitalizing the town with books and began to expand his real estate holdings. On April 1, 1977, tongue firmly planted in cheek, Booth claimed independence from British rule for Hay-on-Wye, declaring it an independent kingdom with himself as king and appointing his horse as Prime Minister. Soon passports were printed, and knighthoods, earldoms and Baronies were conferred (with minimal cost and red tape). Some local officials and the media took all of this a little too seriously, thus assuring national and international fame. By the late Seventies, Hay could boast of numerous bookshops with over one million books in stock.
In the 1990’s the book town concept was copied by towns in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, and now there are official book towns in Norway, and other locations, including the U.S. (Stillwater, Minnesota). There is now an official designation of “book town” and an “International Organisation of Book Towns”, with specific criteria that must be met in order to use the descriptor. A candidate must be a rural town with historic and picturesque qualities and must be blessed by the Lord Protector of All Book Towns – you guessed it, King Richard Booth from Hay-on-Wye. These standards are presumably to keep a town like Brookville, Indiana from just dropping the “r” and instantly becoming “Bookville”. (Or Booklyn, New York, for that matter.)
Belgium has its book town, and it makes Hay-on-Wye look like a sprawling metropolis. Redu is nestled in rolling hills and pastureland in French-speaking Wallonia, about an hour south of Brussels. This tiny town of 450 residents has 23 bookstores and a number of cafes and small inns. I asked a local inn owner how it all happened, and his answer was pure Chamber of Commerce. 20 years ago, a small farming community decided to reinvent itself as a book center, and that’s what it did. A local man named Noel Anselot, who had met Richard Booth in Wales, was a key figure in its transformation. Redu is much more laid back than its Welsh counterpart, and most stores stock only Dutch or French language titles (of course). There are a few that stock English books, so I decided to do an experiment. I would pick a favorite novel and see if I could find it in English. I decided on Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent, and within 30 minutes I had purchased my find.
Redu, in true Belgian fashion, has a local brewery brewing a strong Raspberry beer, and on weekends a local woman sells a variety of cheeses from a cart. We have visited several times and once impulsively spent a March Saturday night there. Walking out of a local cafe, we noticed a sign advertising cheap rooms upstairs. We looked at each other and said, “Why not?” We quickly made a list of the three items we needed to survive: two toothbrushes and one tube of toothpaste. As evidence of the remoteness of Redu, we had to drive 20 minutes to find these provisions.
The second book town to be spawned from Hay-on-Wye is Bredevoort, an 800-year-old village in the Netherlands, nestled in a beautiful region just three miles from the German border. Bredevoort doesn’t have quite the rural feel of Redu; even though it is a town of 1600 inhabitants, you get the feeling of being surrounded by many towns and cities, and that is true. Situated in the most densely populated country in Europe near the vast metropolitan area encompassing Amsterdam and Rotterdam, as well as the Ruhr industrial region of Germany, there are 15 million people within a two-hour drive of Bredevoort. Not a bad market.
Like many book towns, this one owes its metamorphosis and revival to an individual. Henk Ruessink, a retired teacher and member of the local Citizen’s Union, having read about Hay-on-Wye, paid a visit there and returned to convince authorities on both sides of the border of the viability of the book town model. Spurred by incentive of cheap real estate, the original group of five booksellers in 1993 has grown to over 20 now, with a few art galleries and workshops added for local charm.
My librarian companion and I drove over one Saturday and started our tour with a cup of coffee in a local café. Suitably caffeinated, we set out to browse many of the 20 bookshops. A few had sections with English books, but most stocks were in the native Dutch. As you book-o-philes know, in most used bookstores, the price is marked in pencil on the first page. In one store we visited, none of the books were priced, which is unnerving to a treasure hunter. Cheryl found a hardcover Daphne du Maurier and approached the shopkeeper, a stout and stern Dutch fellow, to ask its price. He studied it intently with pursed lips and furrowed brow for a full 45 seconds, leafing through the pages, holding it up and bouncing it in his hand, as though its weight had some direct bearing upon its value, leafing through once again. Based upon this mental exertion, we expected an exorbitant price, but then he held up two fingers, indicating two Euros. Ten minutes later I approached him with a Jane Austen I had discovered for Cheryl. Same routine. After his careful and thorough assay, he gave his verdict. Two fingers. I decided to make one last pass through the disorganized stacks, thinking that I might find a Guttenberg Bible or early copy of the Magna Carta – It seemed like we were on a two Euro roll.
The joy of a book town is the sheer surfeit of shops in a densely packed area, but the real thrill is experiencing any used bookstore. There’s something exciting about that distinctive smell – dust, aging paper, mildew. The aisles are usually claustrophobic and the stock disorganized or piled floor to ceiling. It’s easy to lose track of time searching for that personal treasure and squeezing down creaking aisles while the clerk sits up front lost in his current book.
Except for the possible return trip to one of these three towns, we don’t envision visiting others. Western Norway is a long way away, as is Stillwater, Minnesota. And it’s probably for the best. I love being surrounded by books, but it’s getting out of hand at the Prince house. I decided to do a quick count of the books in our small two-bedroom apartment. Not counting a number of boxes stored in the garage, there are 533 books in three living room bookshelves and 297 on the shelves in the second bedroom. 292 books are stacked in piles next to the bed, in the closet, and in plastic boxes under the bed. A final sweep of nightstands and couch-side baskets nets another 76, for a grand total of 1198 volumes. Wait, I just remembered the 50 or so that are circulating worldwide from the Prince Lending Library. (Author’s note: When the movers itemized our books for the move back to the U.S. in 2006, the total was up to 1700.)
I’m getting scared, because it is becoming clear that I am married to someone with a serious problem. She is exhibiting all of the telltale warning signs: denying the problem, claiming that she can stop any time she wants. Books in secret hiding places and reading alone. Binge buying. (curse you, Amazon.). She has followed through on her promise to get involved in a support group, but all they do is buy more books and discuss them once a month. And she does volunteer work in a library, which isn’t helping her recovery. I guess I should look on the bright side: We’re well on our way to stocking our first used bookstore some day.
UPDATE: Times change, and the pandemic has accelerated those changes. Hay-on-Wye lists 20 bookstores as of December 2020, down from 39 when we visited some 15 years ago. Redu, which had over 20 bookstores then, now has 9.