At City Journal, Dalrymple offers a rich portrait of Hay-on-Wye, the small Welsh border town that became the world’s first to make the sale of secondhand books its principal business. He weaves together the town’s many literary associations, from the Reverend Kilvert’s charming diary to Bruce Chatwin’s novel and the infamous Hay Poisoner, and celebrates the eccentric entrepreneurialism of Richard Booth, who declared himself king and built an empire of books.
I am not a bibliophile but a bibliomaniac: I have always lived partly through books, and now I live predominantly through them.