Authors Electric

'King of Hay' memorial Royalty is very much on my mind lately, with this post publishing just two days after the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. We now have a new monarch, King Charles III. But this post is not about him. I'd like to introduce you to a slightly lesser-known monarch... meet Richard Booth (1938-2019), bookseller extraordinaire and self-proclaimed King of Hay! If you've ever visited Hay-on-Wye on the border between England and Wales, you'll already know its fame as a "town of books". It seems every historic street contains a bookshop of some description, many of them selling second-hand volumes that will keep your average book lover (me!) happy for hours browsing the shelves for rare copies of magazines and bargain paperbacks of every conceivable genre. The Hay Literary Festival has become big business, celebrity authors rubbing shoulders with debut novelists as they give talks and interviews to packed marquees on the Festival site. I ca...

Looking for Literature, an Autofictional Adventure*  I had come to Hay-on-Wye at the suggestion of a friend. You could say, I suppose that I was looking for love as well as literature, although the two things in my mind were very close together. It was the Whit half-term, and I was eager to fill the space imposed on me by the five-day holiday. For busy parents it was always too full, but for me, who normally had charge of their offspring, it was often empty.   The Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival at the time had been going for about a year and was still very much a work in progress. It had been organised at a number of venues in the centre of a town which was famous for its many second-hand bookshops. The most well-known of these was that of Richard Booth, the King of Hay, and some of the booksellers there were not always too keen on the influx of literary tourists, me being one. I had, however, managed to get a single room in a wonderful hotel called The Seven Stars in the centr...

The Hay Literary Festival is something of a pilgrimage for me, dating from the days I lived an hour's leisurely drive across the border and along the River Wye. One year I was even invited as an author to talk in a big tent about my first 'Seven Fabulous Wonders' adventure THE GREAT PYRAMID ROBBERY (and Hay must have worked its magic, since that is still the best selling title of the seven in the series). I don't think I've missed a Festival in 20 years, except of course this year when it, like pretty much every other event where literary folks mingle to exchange ideas, was cancelled "due to Covid". Well, dear Dictator Covid, this month I decided to risk the rising number of cases in Wales and the threat of a last-minute local lockdown, and drove across the border anyway to visit Hay and see if there were still any ideas knocking around. The experience was, as expected, a little sad. Half the smaller bookshops seemed to be closed (though hopefully just tem...