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. In its depiction of Richard Booth’s monomaniacal creation of the Hay-on-Wye that the world knows and celebrates to today as the Town of Books and home of the great literary festival, this terrific book would be fascinating enough. But somehow the telling of it all contrives to add up to more than the sum of those parts alone and emerges as 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
Wonderful and astute… The Bookseller of Hay will, I have no doubt, make a classic, rollicking, award-winning film… Had I the loot, I’d snap up the rights instantly * The Oldie *
Hanning’s book is fascinating and is full of larger-than-life characters * London Standard *
In an age of tedious homogeneity, The Bookseller of Hay unabashedly flicks two fingers… Hanning deals deftly with it all, overcoming the intricacies of local chatter to provide an amusingly universal tale * Country Life Magazine *
Meticulously researched… The Bookseller Of Hay really captures the 1960s-70s heyday of Booth’s reign * Buzz Magazine *
The annual literary festival at Hay-on-Wye is a great cultural event of the year, and one of the key figures behind its founding and subsequent success is given his due in James Hanning’s charming biography… The book neatly captures a bygone age of eccentricity * Independent *
The book is every bit a classic as Kilvert’s Diary. There is detailed, non-judgmental gossip in every paragraph. And Booth’s redeeming feature? He loved farm workers and The Blue Boar pub * The Field *
First class … a truly remarkable study in human eccentricity triumphing over ordinariness * Simon Jenkins *

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’.

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