...or maybe it's just because I have a thing for books. And another for Wales. There's a review up at the New York Times (sorry, free registration required), covering both the travel and the Welsh book festival:
THE tiny town of Hay-on-Wye in southeastern Wales seems like a curious place to hold a major literary festival. Getting there involves a circuitous three-and-a-half-hour drive from London through traffic-snarled highways and back roads crowded with ancient farm vehicles. Big on charm but low on hotels (there is only one), Hay also has the disadvantage of being situated in some kind of freakish precipitation belt that attracts an unusual amount of rain.
Yet the Hay Festival, which began in 1988 as an insane glint in the eye of its organizer, Peter Florence, has expanded and expanded to become one of the world's best-known and most exciting literary events — the "Woodstock of the mind," as former President Clinton, a participant several years ago, put it. (Think of it as a literary Sundance festival, minus the Hollywood swag.)
For 10 days at the end of May, the town is given over to writers, and its population of 1,500 swells to a remarkable 80,000, as visitors troop to see the likes of Dave Eggers, Kazuo Ishiguro, Don DeLillo, John Updike, Clive James, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, Patrick McGrath, Jeannette Winterson, Doris Lessing and Jaqueline Wilson, to name a few who have appeared recently.
Not only can these writers engage in ordinary literary-festival activities — reading from their works, discussing their inspirations and answering the inevitable pen-or-pencil-preference question — but they can also be found wandering around town, ordering coffee in local cafes, getting drunk in the bars and buying books in the used-book stores for which Hay is renowned. [...]
That Hay has an absurdly high concentration of used-book stores — some three dozen of them — is due in large part to the efforts of Richard Booth, a zealous used-book seller who opened his first shop in 1961 and has actively encouraged others to follow. Which is the best store? Who knows?
There's one devoted to mysteries and thrillers, one to poetry, one to bee-related books, another to books about music, and another to rare children's books. There are huge ones, like the Hay Cinema Bookshop, and modest-size ones, like the delightfully named Sensible Bookshop. [...]
The town is tiny, built around just a few main streets in the shadow of a large ruin of a castle that dates to the 13th century and has survived multiple sackings and multiple fires. It now houses a two-bedroom rental apartment, a bookshop and a 24-hour outdoor display of books that are sold on the "honesty" system — you leave 30 pence for a paperback, 50 pence for a hardback.
The town is relatively quiet in the off-season, but during the festival — which mostly takes place to one side, in an elaborate city of tents that rises, mushroomlike, out of the wet soil each year — it is literally thronging with people. (The invited writers may sometimes feign unhappiness at the zealousness of the fans, but they would be devastated to be left out of the festival.) You will have to fight the crowds in the streets and in the stores. [...]
Hay may be out of the way, but it is surrounded by delicious, London-quality food. With a range of so-called gastro-pubs — pubs selling superior food cooked by talented chefs — in the area, we settled on the Felin Fach Griffin, about 10 miles down the road. The atmosphere was mellow but the food serious. I particularly liked my roast halibut, Robert's bitter chocolate cake with orange sorbet, and the spectacularly crispy French fries.
The fields across Wales were dotted with tiny newborn lambs, the sight of which inspired us to pay a visit the next day to the Small Breeds Farm Park and Owl Center in nearby Kington. There, we met a baby owl that looked like a dust mop; cuddled a 2-week-old pygmy goat; saw our first chinchilla; and were introduced to a small herd of miniature horses and donkeys.
The area around Hay is rich in walking possibilities, if you don't mind a little precipitation. We drove toward the Black Mountains, and suddenly the trees and bushes gave way to moss and thick, wiry grass. The wind howled, the rain beat down, the feeling was desolate, and if the climb up the nearest hill was steeper and harder than it looked, the climb down was much worse. [...]
I have to say, Hay-on-Wye sounds like a great place to visit on vacation--perhaps at any point in the tourist "offseason" rather than for the Hay Festival, although the possibility of running into David Mitchell (or any other author of your choice) is pretty enticing. Anyhow, I've cut large parts of the article because it's kind of long (2 "pages"), so I recommend reading the whole thing.
Yes Hay does sound like a "cool" (and wet) place to visit. But as you point out, off-season sounds like a better idea -what with just one hotel in town.
Did you know that Texas too has a famous "book town"? Author Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, Last Picture Show) grew up in Archer City Texas where as a book loving child, he had a very difficult time finding books because the town lacked a good book store or library. Upon becoming a successful author, he got into the book selling business. Eventually, he opened the most famous book store in Texas in his child hood home of Archer City.
See what he said about Hay-on-Wye.
"....By the late 1980s, he(McMurtry) had published more than 10 books and received the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove. He began to think seriously about an old dream: owning a huge used bookstore and locating it in a small book town —where a bookstore is the primary business.
“There are 10 or 12 book towns in the world. The most famous is Hay-on-Wye in Wales, which has a store started in 1962,” McMurtry says.
He turned to Archer City, which he had revisited often while living on the East Coast. In 1987, he opened the town’s first bookstore, The Blue Pig. When the store outgrew its space, McMurtry moved it to a vacant car dealership down the street from the courthouse and changed its name to Booked Up.
Today, Booked Up is the largest business in Archer City, with four buildings on the square. When he’s in town, McMurtry works in the store for about three hours a day, unpacking, hauling and shelving boxes of books. He also talks to fellow booksellers around the nation several times a week..."
Posted by: Ruchira Paul | May 13, 2006 at 11:22 PM
Before yesterday I had no idea that "book towns" even existed--but I've got to admit, even knowing that, Texas wouldn't have been my first guess for the location of one in the United States!
Posted by: Joe | May 14, 2006 at 11:43 PM