Hay might look, at first glance, like a small, dull place, but in reality it has hundreds of stories to tell. One of the strangest I’ve heard is that so far is that of Richard Booth. His life is well known among the locals, but for those of us who visit the area for the first time, it’s amazing. Booth began his path to fame as a second-hand bookseller. His friends came from far afield to buy the copies he selected. He soon realised that he had a talent for finding unusual things that fascinated people. That was how he came to open his first used bookstore in 1961. What happened next is well known: many others followed his example and Hay was gradually transformed into the “world second-hand bookshop capital”.
Booth’s influence and his recognition in the community were so great that he decided to declare himself king. He had a coronation and started to call himself Richard Coeur de Livre. He spent all his savings to buy a castle that was almost in ruins. Once he had installed himself there, he named his court: some of his friends and his horse. Booth reigned to his heart’s delight: he even asked his subjects to have a passport and proposed that Hay declare its independence from Wales. This, of course, was never going to happen. Many citizens, especially older ones, were concerned and wrote letters of complaint to the authorities. The matter even came to be discussed in Parliament.
Those I asked about this subject – all of them locals – recalled it with a smile:
“He’s a man with a fantastic sense of humour, it was all just a joke that went a bit too far,” said one restaurant owner.
“Nobody ever took Richard’s declarations seriously,” maintains a woman whom he named the queen of a street, after giving her a gold-dipped flower as a sceptre. “He’s one of the funniest men I’ve ever met.”
“It’s thanks to him that people started talking about our town all over the world,” a driver tells me.
Booth became famous anyway. Reporters from around the world arrived at Hay to interview its eccentric monarch. Booth had them put up in a friend’s small hotel and made them wait for days to be received at his court. Once he brought a van of artichokes to the house of a friend who was a chef, and asked him to make several litres of soup out of them. Once it was ready, he froze it. Each time somebody came to interview him, he would serve the journalist a dish of soup and tell them it was a powerful aphrodisiac.
Today Booth is an elderly man and he is too ill to leave his house. But his legend hovers around every corner of the town.