The Bookseller of Hay

'A breathtakingly hilarious and absorbing portrait of one of the most brilliant, dotty, dippy delirious yet ultimately inspiring eccentrics in British history . . . A remarkable story of cultural life, friendship, obsession and passion' Stephen Fry

'Brilliantly evocative, like listening to the gossip of ghosts' Bruce Robinson

'The Bookseller of Hay is the very model of a biography which amazes, occasionally horrifies and entirely engrosses . . . James Hanning is a writer of sublime insight, style and skill' Horatio Clare

'What you have to understand is that Richard Booth was completely mad' Marianne Faithfull


In 1962, a young man left university without a degree and, for want of anything better to do, bought a small shop in an obscure market town on the edge of the Brecon Beacons. Within fifteen years, largely through force of personality, Richard Booth had created the world's largest second-hand bookshop, attracting thousands of visitors from across the globe to Hay-on-Wye, on the Welsh border.

The Bookseller of Hay tells the tale of an extraordinary, chaotic man, a true British eccentric, who invented the term 'book town', attracted a coterie of exotic and illustrious followers, crowned himself king, declared the town's independence and provided the bookish backdrop which - to his frustration - allowed a rival attraction, the now world-famous Hay Festival, to flourish.

It is a story of the extraordinary singlemindedness of a hard-working, hard-playing and rebellious son of privilege, inspired by a romantic vision and a deep love of the area, of a man better suited to publicity than bean-counting, who launched countless careers but whose business instincts undermined precisely what had brought success. Booth was a deeply divisive figure, but love him or hate him, all agree on one thing. He put Hay on the map.

James Hanning, a frequent visitor to Hay since the 1960s, has interviewed dozens of local people and booksellers and with typical acuity wonderfully captures this bygone era of eccentricity and excess.

James Hanning is a former deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday. His first book, co-authored with Francis Elliott of The Times, was a biography of David Cameron, which ran to three editions and is widely regarded as the definitive book on Cameron. Building on a longstanding interest in the phone hacking scandal, in 2014 his book The News Machine, written with exclusive access to the News of the World's chief investigator Glenn Mulcaire, lifted the lid on the unlawful climate on that newspaper in the early 2000s. One admirer described it as reading 'like a thriller'.

His book on Soviet mole Kim Philby's time in Beirut shed remarkable new light on the spy's domestic life, and exclusively revealed new evidence from the late art historian Brian Sewell and others about the events that brought about the shocking denouement of his story.

James is married and has two daughters.