The annual Hay Literary Festival is held in campgrounds around the town
The Hay Literary Festival is one of the largest national reading events in the UK today. In 1987, young actor Peter Florence started the festival in the small town of Hay with a sum of money earned from playing cards. From the beginning of the first Hay Literary Festival until now, it has maintained the original purpose of the festival - "to bring writers and readers together". Therefore, in addition to the book fairs that are common at traditional literary festivals, Hay pays special attention to various seminars and speeches. This year's Hay Literary Festival will be held from May 24 to June 3, in the organizers announced on the official website of the schedule, around the novel, poetry, drama, science and other different themes will have more than 800 events, heavyweight guests include former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Chelsea Clinton, British "gardening god" Monty Don, novelist Ian McEwan, Maggie O'Farrell and Andre Ashmond, etc. After Ashmond's novel "Call Me by Your Name" was changed to the film of the same name, It made a big splash at last year's Berlin Film Festival.
Stills from Call Me By Your Name
Hay is a typical British mountain town, beautiful and boring, such a town in the United Kingdom is probably no less than a hundred, but only Hay has become a world-famous book town. At present, this town with a permanent population of only more than 1,500 people has 41 bookstores. Among these bookstores, there are elegantly decorated boutique bookstores that specialize in selling rare editions of ancient books, to book supermarkets that have all their books heroically placed on the lawn and let buyers buy books completely by themselves, as well as many themed bookstores such as movies, detectives, and children, but these bookstores have one thing in common - they do not sell new books, but mainly second-hand and antique books, and even Dickens's first and out-of-print books. These collections have attracted countless second-hand book fans to search for treasures, and the town has become known as the capital of old books in the world.
Hay's second-hand bookstore
Book lovers at the Literary Festival
The reason why Hay has become a popular mecca for bookworms today has a lot to do with Richard Booth, the "King of Hay Country". In the 1960s, Richard returned to his hometown of Hay after graduating from Oxford University and began to build a second-hand library to fulfill his childhood dream. At that time, the physical bookstore in the United States was rapidly declining, and he took the people of the town to the United States to buy second-hand books and transport them back to the town. Richard himself was a gimmick and a provocative, so he was emulated by the rest of the town. At that time, the Hay people were buying old books everywhere, and the town's garages, warehouses and even castles were full of old books. On April Fool's Day in 1977, Richard abruptly declared the town independent and proclaimed himself "King of Hay". He formed a cabinet, also wrote the so-called Declaration of Autonomy, designed the "national flag" and "paper money", printed his own currency and stamps ... This whimsical move attracted "carpet bombing" from the Western media, and Hay was "very generous" to promote it for free. It is false that the town of Hay is independent, and it is true that the "kingdom" that specializes in selling old books is true, and Richard has achieved his goal, and after this toss, the town has not only become famous from then on, becoming the "capital of old books", but also Booth himself has really become "the king of the book town". The locals have great respect for him, saying that it was he who created the myth of the world's first book town.
People are looking for books in Hay
Hay's books are expensive, a volume of Dickens's first edition of "Great Prospects" costs ten thousand pounds, Hay's books are also cheap, most of the second-hand books are priced at only one-tenth of the original price, and at the time of the big sale, a book can even be bought for 50 pence. Every year, more than a million tourists come here to read, buy and shop for books. In the United States, France, Canada, the Netherlands and other places, there have been dozens of book towns modeled after Hay, and the Hay Literature Festival every May has also derived a number of "overseas semicolons". In September this year, the Overseas Hay Literary Festival will be held in Mexico and Spain, and in November, it will move to Peru.
Most second-hand books are priced cheaply