Having been found guilty of treason in a court convened by the Council of State in the Commonwealth of Hay, Richard Booth, King of Hay, was "sentenced to death", with the date of execution to be announced. Having met to decide on what will undoubtedly prove to be a solemn and momentous occasion, the Council of State can now announce that the prisoner will be led to the scaffold in Hay, on September 12th., 2009. Invitations to the event will be handed out freely during the Hay Festival, but only to those not holding a Sony Reader.
We have sympathy for some of the anti-corporate themes developed by the King over the years, but he seems to have missed a possibly uncalculated gesture of insensitivity from the Festival to second-hand booksellers in giving a paid platform to Sony and its attempts to market an ebook reader at the Festival. With Oxfam's presence at the Festival to accept book donations from the public, and Sony's hawking of electronic readers at the same site, Festivaleers can now forego the pleasure of selling their books to second-hand booksellers in Hay, and simultaneously contemplate not having to buy any more before they leave. What used to be a festival of literature has now become not only a festival of celebrity, but also a market for centralised UK media to support the interests of transnational corporations against a second-hand economy. Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival, said through the Guardian (the Festival's chief sponsors), "Hay is the world's greatest book town and the Reader from Sony is the most exciting development in years for those who love reading". As a group of booksellers, the Commonwealth of Hay has had much trouble seeing the connexion between the clauses in that statement, and we would welcome any enlightening correspondence from other concerned booksellers, if indeed an explanation is available that way. This is an issue which must travel far and wide past the borders of Hay.
Locally, and in an ill-judged campaign following his trial, Richard Booth has made approaches to the Commonwealth of Hay, proposing that the leading members of the Council of State join a royal party, including Arthur Scargill - two kings for the price of one - and march against Hay Festival on May 23rd. to protest what the Booth sees to be the pernicious influence of Rupert Murdoch's support for the Festival, and to make it known beyond the independent nation of Hay that Sky's 'tactic' to "steal the name of Hay" cannot go unchallenged. The Council of State carefully weighed the King's 'offer', and found it to be wanting in practical respects. Moreover, we find it impossible to deal with the King in this matter, not only because he stands condemned since April, but because we believe there are issues which are equally important: to exclude those issues in another obvious tilt at self-publicity designed to save his tottering crown, the King is doing his Kingdom yet more harm than good. In any event, we certainly would find it difficult to associate the Commonwealth of Hay with the (some would say Stalinist) ex-leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, whose decision to align himself with the King of Hay was once described in the Weekly Worker (a publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Provisional Central Committee) as "scraping the barrel". (Issue #279)
A propos of everything, the Council have also noted that Richard Booth has been supporting, through billboard advertising, a fringe "philosophy festival" at the Globe at Hay, held during the Hay Festival. We're certain that had the King checked a little more closely into how things happen in Hay nowadays, he'd have noticed that the fringe event has had a good deal of technical and administrative support from the Hay Festival itself. It's clear that although the King has gained some respect for his opinions about the creeping re-branding of Hay, his information about how this is actually happening is inadequate to the task he appears to be taking on. If the King didn't know of the fringe event's association with Hay Festival, then his organization is clearly not what it used to be; if the King did know of the connexion, then he is guilty not only of treason, but also of hypocrisy. It's no wonder his old fire on the subject of a winter economy for booktowns seems to have died down somewhat.
What we don't need in Hay is yet another monarchy-supported commercial initiative vying for existing customers during the Festival: we need to make it clear that the town is built on the printed word, and survives for the great bulk of the year on the printed word. The second-hand book is indeed a precious international resource, and it's the very vitality of the second-hand book in an international market which is being endangered in a seemingly headlong rush for lifestyle delivery. Perhaps the King has forgotten his own offspring, but we haven't. Other booktowns should take note of the often insidious nature of re-branding, and all booksellers wherever they are should enter into an international debate not only about Sony's marketing, but about Amazon's Kindle - upon which Sony UK, according to the Guardian, "is aiming to steal a march."
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Private Eye, no. 1232, 20 March - 2 April 2009
The apparently frivolous business of the People's Republic of Hay-on-Wye and self-appointed "King of Hay" Richard Booth's impending defenestration (Eyes passim) has a serious point.
The "dethroning" - confirmed at a meeting last week - is an attempt to ensure an effective succession, and is very much in Booth's own humorous spirit, with an announcement about the appointment of state executioner promising "an attractive package, including travelling expenses and luncheon vouchers".
Thankfully, festival director Peter Florence is sympathetic, keen to ensure the happy co-existence of festival and town and happy to discuss various options with the booksellers.
However, the booksellers also have to combat a dangerous attitude in the local tourist quangos. At a recent meeting of the great, the good and the bloody awful, the suggestion that "the 'Town of Books' image is strong but may be damaging tourism prospects" was accepted without a murmur, with the phrase "dusty old books" even making an appearance.
The tourist officials seem not to realise that this is Hay's unique selling point. Without "dusty old books" and smelly old authors, would anyone be coming to Hay at all?
(Bookworm: Books & Bookmen)
The "dethroning" - confirmed at a meeting last week - is an attempt to ensure an effective succession, and is very much in Booth's own humorous spirit, with an announcement about the appointment of state executioner promising "an attractive package, including travelling expenses and luncheon vouchers".
Thankfully, festival director Peter Florence is sympathetic, keen to ensure the happy co-existence of festival and town and happy to discuss various options with the booksellers.
However, the booksellers also have to combat a dangerous attitude in the local tourist quangos. At a recent meeting of the great, the good and the bloody awful, the suggestion that "the 'Town of Books' image is strong but may be damaging tourism prospects" was accepted without a murmur, with the phrase "dusty old books" even making an appearance.
The tourist officials seem not to realise that this is Hay's unique selling point. Without "dusty old books" and smelly old authors, would anyone be coming to Hay at all?
(Bookworm: Books & Bookmen)
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
An Appeal
To Booksellers and Retailers, Hay-on-Wye
From Paul Harris, Oxford House Books, and Peter Harries, Boz Books
3rd. March 2009
AN APPEAL FROM THE COUNCIL OF STATE IN THE COMMONWEALTH OF HAY
HAY IS IN DANGER! JOIN US!
Many of you will have seen the posters which have recently appeared around town proclaiming 'Down With The King', or you may be aware of the extraordinary coverage in the media (Independent on Sunday, Private Eye, BBC Radio 4, et al) about the news that a Commonwealth had been declared in Hay-on-Wye, and that moves were underway to bring Richard 'Bokassa' Booth, self-proclaimed king of the first book town, to trial. Alternatively, perhaps you simply heard on the grapevine that 'something' was afoot.
This appeal sets out why we have taken this action, and, more importantly, invites you to join us in our efforts to ensure that Hay remains world-renowned as the book town, with an added diverse range of shops and other attractions worth visiting year-round.
Background
Firstly, we absolutely recognise the key role that Richard Booth has played. After declaring independence on 1st. April 1977, the king began to form a well-documented body of self-publicity which has served the town to great effect through many years. Often bizarre, frequently impenetrable, his pronouncements ensured that Hay continued to appear in the media and were pivotal in making Hay the model for other book towns, as well as making Hay a destination of choice for visitors.
Although the Independent on Sunday perhaps over-emphasized the issues in terms of town versus festival, it's undeniable that visitors and sales have decreased since the festival moved out of town, despite the event's increasing size. We must therefore respond to Festival Director Peter Florence's challenge that booksellers (and presumably other town businesses), 'need to rethink their strategy'. Peter has helpfully offered to explore what this might mean and we plan to meet with him in the near future. In any event, we are painfully aware that in addition to maximising what happens during the festival, there are another 355 days of the year, and we do not exist merely to attack the festival.
The effects of the 'credit crunch' are exacerbated for booksellers by changes to book buying more generally. Increased sales of books by supermarkets, computerisation and the internet all pose severe dangers to independent high street bookshops. More and more dealers are giving up their shops in favour of an internet presence only. The implications of these developments for Hay, where books and the publicity surrounding them are the key drivers of our local economy, are stark for all local businesses and, of course, their employees. At an Open Meeting on the 24th. February, various local groups and individuals nearly all outside the book trade, and partly presided over by the Director of Brecon Beacons Tourism, there appeared the almost unbelievably reckless and ill-informed position that the 'Town of Books' image might be damaging tourism prospects for Hay. Hay, it was argued, appeared to be nothing but a lot of 'dusty old books'. But it is precisely the fact that we are a rural economy based on the second-hand book as an international commodity which makes Hay uniquely different from other market towns in the U.K., and gives the us our undisputed presence as the capital of the global book town movement.
Should any future committee backed by any kind of regional agency decide Hay must move away from what makes it a destination town, a brand recognised from Sydney to San Francisco, it would mean a commercial mistake of jaw-dropping magnitude, and represent an act of extreme cultural barbarism.
So what can we do?
Our conclusion? We're not opposed to new ideas, just backward ones. For every revisionist supporter of the 'dusty old books' routine, we'll find a journalist to oppose them. We will go on where the king is leaving off, celebrating the uniqueness of our town in the way Hay endears itself to national and international travellers, without turning it into a web centric clone of a thousand other inferior destinations.
The decline of Hay, even in these difficult times is not inevitable. We are not powerless in the face of very real economic and social changes - but, if Hay is to be successful for years to come, our publicity machine will need a few more gears. A simple paint job and oiling the old cogs will not be enough.
We suggest that we proclaim even more loudly the end to the monarchy and the institution of a republic: the Commonwealth of Hay. With our plans for the king to appear before the Court of the Council of State on 1st. April to answer charges of dereliction in the matter of duties to his kingdom, we can expect even more national and international coverage.
Join the Revolution!
Please let us know what you think - write, call into our shops, or email us at oxfordhousebooks@aol.com or peter@bozbooks.demon.co.uk
Better still, come along to our next Council meeting on 11th. March at 7.30pm, at the Council Offices near the Clock Tower, to discuss how you can help and what we need to do next.
From Paul Harris, Oxford House Books, and Peter Harries, Boz Books
3rd. March 2009
AN APPEAL FROM THE COUNCIL OF STATE IN THE COMMONWEALTH OF HAY
HAY IS IN DANGER! JOIN US!
Many of you will have seen the posters which have recently appeared around town proclaiming 'Down With The King', or you may be aware of the extraordinary coverage in the media (Independent on Sunday, Private Eye, BBC Radio 4, et al) about the news that a Commonwealth had been declared in Hay-on-Wye, and that moves were underway to bring Richard 'Bokassa' Booth, self-proclaimed king of the first book town, to trial. Alternatively, perhaps you simply heard on the grapevine that 'something' was afoot.
This appeal sets out why we have taken this action, and, more importantly, invites you to join us in our efforts to ensure that Hay remains world-renowned as the book town, with an added diverse range of shops and other attractions worth visiting year-round.
Background
Firstly, we absolutely recognise the key role that Richard Booth has played. After declaring independence on 1st. April 1977, the king began to form a well-documented body of self-publicity which has served the town to great effect through many years. Often bizarre, frequently impenetrable, his pronouncements ensured that Hay continued to appear in the media and were pivotal in making Hay the model for other book towns, as well as making Hay a destination of choice for visitors.
Although the Independent on Sunday perhaps over-emphasized the issues in terms of town versus festival, it's undeniable that visitors and sales have decreased since the festival moved out of town, despite the event's increasing size. We must therefore respond to Festival Director Peter Florence's challenge that booksellers (and presumably other town businesses), 'need to rethink their strategy'. Peter has helpfully offered to explore what this might mean and we plan to meet with him in the near future. In any event, we are painfully aware that in addition to maximising what happens during the festival, there are another 355 days of the year, and we do not exist merely to attack the festival.
The effects of the 'credit crunch' are exacerbated for booksellers by changes to book buying more generally. Increased sales of books by supermarkets, computerisation and the internet all pose severe dangers to independent high street bookshops. More and more dealers are giving up their shops in favour of an internet presence only. The implications of these developments for Hay, where books and the publicity surrounding them are the key drivers of our local economy, are stark for all local businesses and, of course, their employees. At an Open Meeting on the 24th. February, various local groups and individuals nearly all outside the book trade, and partly presided over by the Director of Brecon Beacons Tourism, there appeared the almost unbelievably reckless and ill-informed position that the 'Town of Books' image might be damaging tourism prospects for Hay. Hay, it was argued, appeared to be nothing but a lot of 'dusty old books'. But it is precisely the fact that we are a rural economy based on the second-hand book as an international commodity which makes Hay uniquely different from other market towns in the U.K., and gives the us our undisputed presence as the capital of the global book town movement.
Should any future committee backed by any kind of regional agency decide Hay must move away from what makes it a destination town, a brand recognised from Sydney to San Francisco, it would mean a commercial mistake of jaw-dropping magnitude, and represent an act of extreme cultural barbarism.
So what can we do?
Our conclusion? We're not opposed to new ideas, just backward ones. For every revisionist supporter of the 'dusty old books' routine, we'll find a journalist to oppose them. We will go on where the king is leaving off, celebrating the uniqueness of our town in the way Hay endears itself to national and international travellers, without turning it into a web centric clone of a thousand other inferior destinations.
The decline of Hay, even in these difficult times is not inevitable. We are not powerless in the face of very real economic and social changes - but, if Hay is to be successful for years to come, our publicity machine will need a few more gears. A simple paint job and oiling the old cogs will not be enough.
We suggest that we proclaim even more loudly the end to the monarchy and the institution of a republic: the Commonwealth of Hay. With our plans for the king to appear before the Court of the Council of State on 1st. April to answer charges of dereliction in the matter of duties to his kingdom, we can expect even more national and international coverage.
Join the Revolution!
Please let us know what you think - write, call into our shops, or email us at oxfordhousebooks@aol.com or peter@bozbooks.demon.co.uk
Better still, come along to our next Council meeting on 11th. March at 7.30pm, at the Council Offices near the Clock Tower, to discuss how you can help and what we need to do next.
Sunday, 11 January 2009
Something from the Office of the Witchfinder General
KING OF HAY TO FACE EXTRADITION ?
King Richard Booth, who founded his kingdom in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye, may face extradition from Egypt.
A revolutionary council has today sent an official application to the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office for help in the matter of the King's proposed extradition from Egypt, on grounds of Treason against his people.
King Richard, who created the Kingdom of Hay-On-Wye as Book Capital of the World in the 1960s, sold his main store over a year ago and is currently on holiday in Egypt. His subjects, concerned by his lack of commercial enterprise in the ensuing period have formed a revolutionary Council of State as the sovereign power of the Commonwealth of Hay. They have appointed ministers, including a Commander of all Armies, a Lord of the Admiralty, a Bishop and a Witchfinder General. Revolutionary posters urging the King's execution have been appearing all over Hay in recent days.
Commented Paul Harris, First Minister of the Council, "King Richard is guilty of gross dereliction of duty to his kingdom. Although we have no official extradition treaty with the Egyptians, we hope diplomacy on the part of the British government will serve to bring this alleged criminal back to face trial in Hay-on-Wye. A guilty verdict would almost certainly mean the death penalty. Unfortunately some of the North African states have harboured tyrants and we wish to extradite the King before he flees to Libya, the country that sheltered Idi Amin. With this possibilty in mind, the Council feel that should the King gain the status of international outlaw, then no good can accrue to the reputation of Hay around the globe."
So far no comment has been made by the King or his retainers who are said to be holidaying in the Luxor area of Egypt. Rumours that the King is trying to rally support amongst Hay’s population remain unfounded, though the Council of State is monitoring closely any reports of possible sedition.
King Richard Booth, who founded his kingdom in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye, may face extradition from Egypt.
A revolutionary council has today sent an official application to the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office for help in the matter of the King's proposed extradition from Egypt, on grounds of Treason against his people.
King Richard, who created the Kingdom of Hay-On-Wye as Book Capital of the World in the 1960s, sold his main store over a year ago and is currently on holiday in Egypt. His subjects, concerned by his lack of commercial enterprise in the ensuing period have formed a revolutionary Council of State as the sovereign power of the Commonwealth of Hay. They have appointed ministers, including a Commander of all Armies, a Lord of the Admiralty, a Bishop and a Witchfinder General. Revolutionary posters urging the King's execution have been appearing all over Hay in recent days.
Commented Paul Harris, First Minister of the Council, "King Richard is guilty of gross dereliction of duty to his kingdom. Although we have no official extradition treaty with the Egyptians, we hope diplomacy on the part of the British government will serve to bring this alleged criminal back to face trial in Hay-on-Wye. A guilty verdict would almost certainly mean the death penalty. Unfortunately some of the North African states have harboured tyrants and we wish to extradite the King before he flees to Libya, the country that sheltered Idi Amin. With this possibilty in mind, the Council feel that should the King gain the status of international outlaw, then no good can accrue to the reputation of Hay around the globe."
So far no comment has been made by the King or his retainers who are said to be holidaying in the Luxor area of Egypt. Rumours that the King is trying to rally support amongst Hay’s population remain unfounded, though the Council of State is monitoring closely any reports of possible sedition.
Thursday, 11 December 2008
A Revolution?
From Private Eye, number 1223, 12-25th. Dec., 2008 :
Richard Booth, the self-proclaimed King of Hay-on-Wye, is on the verge of being dethroned.
At a packed meeting last week, a proposal by a group of fellow booksellers to replace the "kingdom" with a "commonwealth" or council of ministers received unanimous support. When "Bokassa" Booth returns from his holiday in Africa, he will be "Arraigned for trial and almost certainly decapitated" by his peers in the Powys book town.
His most heinous crime is that he's perceived to have lost his touch for publicity. Whereas he once drew a lot of welcome attention to Hay with his antics, such as declaring the town an independent republic with its own currency called the "Bootho", he now spends most of his time and effort denigrating the Welsh assembly as a force for evil.
The revolutionaries, including Paul Harris of Oxford House Books, feel they could refocus the publicity on books, arts and the town itself, which needs all the help it can get to survive the recession. They also want to redress, at least partially, the creeping commercialisation of the Hay festival. One bemoans the way the annual literary event is now "dominated by centralised publishing, Sky TV and Barclays Wealth".
The move has been helped by Booth's sale of his main bookshop in 2005, which removed most of his power base. All those who led the proposal and voted for it acknowledge that they owe their livelihoods to Booth, but equally all agree that the time has come for him to abdicate.
"He's lost the plot," said one. "It's exactly like Thatcher."
(Books and Bookmen)
Richard Booth, the self-proclaimed King of Hay-on-Wye, is on the verge of being dethroned.
At a packed meeting last week, a proposal by a group of fellow booksellers to replace the "kingdom" with a "commonwealth" or council of ministers received unanimous support. When "Bokassa" Booth returns from his holiday in Africa, he will be "Arraigned for trial and almost certainly decapitated" by his peers in the Powys book town.
His most heinous crime is that he's perceived to have lost his touch for publicity. Whereas he once drew a lot of welcome attention to Hay with his antics, such as declaring the town an independent republic with its own currency called the "Bootho", he now spends most of his time and effort denigrating the Welsh assembly as a force for evil.
The revolutionaries, including Paul Harris of Oxford House Books, feel they could refocus the publicity on books, arts and the town itself, which needs all the help it can get to survive the recession. They also want to redress, at least partially, the creeping commercialisation of the Hay festival. One bemoans the way the annual literary event is now "dominated by centralised publishing, Sky TV and Barclays Wealth".
The move has been helped by Booth's sale of his main bookshop in 2005, which removed most of his power base. All those who led the proposal and voted for it acknowledge that they owe their livelihoods to Booth, but equally all agree that the time has come for him to abdicate.
"He's lost the plot," said one. "It's exactly like Thatcher."
(Books and Bookmen)
Friday, 5 September 2008
A Revolution, Please
Here's some news some of the younger 'retail assistants' in Hay might not know, or indeed even appreciate if they did: price has never been the sole determining factor of interest for book buyers as a group. Nevertheless, some shops in Hay appear to be encouraging a permanent rummage sale; this isn't done with the theoretical long-term prosperity of the town in mind. In fact, there's no forward-thinking being done, only reaction to current circumstance or popular trend, whichever comes first. In the case of current circumstance, it's vaguely understandable, but the ploy has the added effect of shaping popular trends. It's done because it's the easiest thing to do, and the result is inevitable. It might make money in the short term, but there's nothing substantial worth analyzing, and it looks cheap. Hay is becoming one of the biggest brick-and-mortar boot-sales in the U.K., and we appear to be losing a large part of what used to be the key customer demographic. One main street bookseller in Hay has said that the second-hand book trade is now ready for burial. I've got news for him, too: that's the way it appears if you insist upon overwhelming your existing, reasonably interesting stuff with a mountain of modern gloss. The resulting sales picture is certain to skew your belief, thereby leading you to an inescapable falsehood. What customers you get through your door are buying what's on offer, and you begin to believe that's what everybody wants.
What's now known as 'the credit crunch' can account for only a smaller part of an immediately recent decline. Hay is becoming a victim of much deeper, difficult problems which need solving; otherwise the result will be three or four owners of nine or ten bookshops jostling for increasingly compromised positions in an atmosphere more redolent of 1950s Blackpool than a once hugely attractive rural economy with the ability to draw relatively 'high-rollers' from all corners of the planet. I'm not saying we shouldn't have cheap books in Hay, because clearly not everyone is on the lookout for Sangorski bindings or early coloured atlases. I'm not saying that a historical feature of the traditional bookshop, a few cheaper items outside the front door, shouldn't be in the mix. But to headline a £2.00 bargain basement, or to scream aloud that everything is only a quid, or 'here's a ton of crap with a fluorescent orange star stuck to it' isn't any more sophisticated or appetizing than the microphone-barking from the grey-meat van at a Sunday market. There have always been cheapskates, but to offer too much encouragement in their direction is an enormous mistake. To the greenhorn visitor, it can look like an over-arching sales principle of the neighbourhood, a commercial commandment; to the the tutored collector it can look plain tiresome, and like many things touted with 'wow factor', it's cosmetic, without depth.
Once, visitors looked for real bargains, the hitherto unnoticed jewel, not the 'bargains' of the banner advertisement, and while the internet has shaken up the bookselling trade in Hay as much as anywhere else, I don't believe the correct strategic long-term response is to cheapen the feel of the town.
There have been, I believe, two notable events helping to signpost Hay's decline; neither might have appeared to be anything to worry about when they happened, and they certainly weren't significant in terms of immediate economic effect. Neither, however, can be confidently said to have helped the town. The first was the loss of Mark Westwood Books from close to the Buttermarket. It's been said by contibutors to web book forums that Mark's is the only place of note in the new booktown of Sedbergh. Tragically compounding the loss was the filling of the vacuum with a bookshop of somewhat lesser stature. The change could only be construed as having a negative impact on the town, perhaps not by mathematical measurement or aesthetic assessment, but by merely positing the opposite of the notion that it might be good for the town. Similar slightly-less-than-challenging shops have emerged from the same re-emergent source, and, I understand, the source was at one point ready for another premises.
More fundamentally, the outpourings of the semi-retired, and so commercially marginalized King of Hay are now absenting themselves. The apparent insanity of many of the Royal rants and proclamations was always a guaranteed source of free global publicity, but any Hay bookseller who thinks that the town can prosper indefinitely on old news cuttings is trying to avoid very bad news indeed: it can't, and it won't. The Boston Globe, the Japan Times, or the Johannesburg Daily Mail & Guardian will not be reporting in future that somewhere in Wales (or is it England?) you can get tons books for a quid, because that's not worthy of news, not even a filler. Yes, the Castle Green, with it's decaying, al fresco 50p tat has been seen all over the world, but the town's success wasn't predicated on the 50p-phenomenon. The Green became photographed constantly because it relied primarily on the notion of honesty in payment, not on the philosophy of cheapness. That the books were crap, (and are getting worse) is beside the point, although once - I know - slightly better books were frequently used, and even the odd low-level 'gem' inserted just to keep it all in constant view, simmering, worthwhile.
We need a publicity boost to take us through what might become the leanest period seen in Hay for over a quarter of a century. It's not enough to trade on the fact that Hay became a globally-known 'brand', and if anyone thinks that it can, then they need to be reminded of this: Macdonalds and Ford Motors will never be famous enough to suspend the self-generation of publicity. A worldwide burger chain doesn't stop publicizing itself even when half the population of the planet knows about them.
We've been lucky in the past: 9/11 came closer to the end of a tourist season than at any other time, and we avoided the worst that might have happened. But we won't be quite so lucky if we begin to rely upon fading glories, and cheap books to match the obvious current recession. The cheap books might sell, and even sell well in the interim before boom, but they won't attract the sort of customer who might want to put up at the Swan, or the Black Lion. It's no base to build on. People can get out of the habit of visiting places, and the ones who were missing all along might just not return.
While it's true that the market will operate in favour of whoever can afford available premises, and get to the opportunity first, there is still enough of an experience base to fight off the effects of the arrival of 'race to the bottom' in Hay. There's enough experience and knowledge to make the town internationally recognised for what it can offer, not for what it's trying to offload. We need a renewed ideal, not the vision of the political arena, where problems are spinningly described as challenges. The future for Hay as a town known and derided for its remainders and bargain basements is almost clinically depressing, and if some of us are to avoid an extended trip to the blue funk factory, we need to reinvent Hay as an international destination. We can't do away with the remainders and the trumpeted 'bargains', because any overture to the sellers would be resisted strongly. We need to attract and re-attract the sort of customers who will invisibly force upwards the standard of supply, and return the town to the top of the curve, where it once was.
Until the Revolution, I'm going to fill a unit with cheap, but good condition books, and run it along the lines of the Castle Green. It will be in the dry, and it can run almost by itself, year-round. Lesser-committed readers and day trippers will have a replacement venue when the King goes into terminal decline, and if this is seen as contrary to the idea that a proliferation of cheap books is not in interests of the town, then it should be looked at as an extension, and then a replacement of the Honesty principle. The power behind the old principle is also in need of regeneration, probably in a new form. Some things have a power to attract free publicity, and serious publicity is only going to come with a serious event.
What's now known as 'the credit crunch' can account for only a smaller part of an immediately recent decline. Hay is becoming a victim of much deeper, difficult problems which need solving; otherwise the result will be three or four owners of nine or ten bookshops jostling for increasingly compromised positions in an atmosphere more redolent of 1950s Blackpool than a once hugely attractive rural economy with the ability to draw relatively 'high-rollers' from all corners of the planet. I'm not saying we shouldn't have cheap books in Hay, because clearly not everyone is on the lookout for Sangorski bindings or early coloured atlases. I'm not saying that a historical feature of the traditional bookshop, a few cheaper items outside the front door, shouldn't be in the mix. But to headline a £2.00 bargain basement, or to scream aloud that everything is only a quid, or 'here's a ton of crap with a fluorescent orange star stuck to it' isn't any more sophisticated or appetizing than the microphone-barking from the grey-meat van at a Sunday market. There have always been cheapskates, but to offer too much encouragement in their direction is an enormous mistake. To the greenhorn visitor, it can look like an over-arching sales principle of the neighbourhood, a commercial commandment; to the the tutored collector it can look plain tiresome, and like many things touted with 'wow factor', it's cosmetic, without depth.
Once, visitors looked for real bargains, the hitherto unnoticed jewel, not the 'bargains' of the banner advertisement, and while the internet has shaken up the bookselling trade in Hay as much as anywhere else, I don't believe the correct strategic long-term response is to cheapen the feel of the town.
There have been, I believe, two notable events helping to signpost Hay's decline; neither might have appeared to be anything to worry about when they happened, and they certainly weren't significant in terms of immediate economic effect. Neither, however, can be confidently said to have helped the town. The first was the loss of Mark Westwood Books from close to the Buttermarket. It's been said by contibutors to web book forums that Mark's is the only place of note in the new booktown of Sedbergh. Tragically compounding the loss was the filling of the vacuum with a bookshop of somewhat lesser stature. The change could only be construed as having a negative impact on the town, perhaps not by mathematical measurement or aesthetic assessment, but by merely positing the opposite of the notion that it might be good for the town. Similar slightly-less-than-challenging shops have emerged from the same re-emergent source, and, I understand, the source was at one point ready for another premises.
More fundamentally, the outpourings of the semi-retired, and so commercially marginalized King of Hay are now absenting themselves. The apparent insanity of many of the Royal rants and proclamations was always a guaranteed source of free global publicity, but any Hay bookseller who thinks that the town can prosper indefinitely on old news cuttings is trying to avoid very bad news indeed: it can't, and it won't. The Boston Globe, the Japan Times, or the Johannesburg Daily Mail & Guardian will not be reporting in future that somewhere in Wales (or is it England?) you can get tons books for a quid, because that's not worthy of news, not even a filler. Yes, the Castle Green, with it's decaying, al fresco 50p tat has been seen all over the world, but the town's success wasn't predicated on the 50p-phenomenon. The Green became photographed constantly because it relied primarily on the notion of honesty in payment, not on the philosophy of cheapness. That the books were crap, (and are getting worse) is beside the point, although once - I know - slightly better books were frequently used, and even the odd low-level 'gem' inserted just to keep it all in constant view, simmering, worthwhile.
We need a publicity boost to take us through what might become the leanest period seen in Hay for over a quarter of a century. It's not enough to trade on the fact that Hay became a globally-known 'brand', and if anyone thinks that it can, then they need to be reminded of this: Macdonalds and Ford Motors will never be famous enough to suspend the self-generation of publicity. A worldwide burger chain doesn't stop publicizing itself even when half the population of the planet knows about them.
We've been lucky in the past: 9/11 came closer to the end of a tourist season than at any other time, and we avoided the worst that might have happened. But we won't be quite so lucky if we begin to rely upon fading glories, and cheap books to match the obvious current recession. The cheap books might sell, and even sell well in the interim before boom, but they won't attract the sort of customer who might want to put up at the Swan, or the Black Lion. It's no base to build on. People can get out of the habit of visiting places, and the ones who were missing all along might just not return.
While it's true that the market will operate in favour of whoever can afford available premises, and get to the opportunity first, there is still enough of an experience base to fight off the effects of the arrival of 'race to the bottom' in Hay. There's enough experience and knowledge to make the town internationally recognised for what it can offer, not for what it's trying to offload. We need a renewed ideal, not the vision of the political arena, where problems are spinningly described as challenges. The future for Hay as a town known and derided for its remainders and bargain basements is almost clinically depressing, and if some of us are to avoid an extended trip to the blue funk factory, we need to reinvent Hay as an international destination. We can't do away with the remainders and the trumpeted 'bargains', because any overture to the sellers would be resisted strongly. We need to attract and re-attract the sort of customers who will invisibly force upwards the standard of supply, and return the town to the top of the curve, where it once was.
Until the Revolution, I'm going to fill a unit with cheap, but good condition books, and run it along the lines of the Castle Green. It will be in the dry, and it can run almost by itself, year-round. Lesser-committed readers and day trippers will have a replacement venue when the King goes into terminal decline, and if this is seen as contrary to the idea that a proliferation of cheap books is not in interests of the town, then it should be looked at as an extension, and then a replacement of the Honesty principle. The power behind the old principle is also in need of regeneration, probably in a new form. Some things have a power to attract free publicity, and serious publicity is only going to come with a serious event.
Saturday, 23 August 2008
Rules of the House
I was going to say, before a couple of months and the purchase and processing of a few thousand volumes on political economy interrupted what some might call my rigidity of perceptual stance, that things are getting worse in Hay, both economically and socially. Visitor numbers are decreasing, and the demographic is changing perceptibly. Perhaps the corollary to the proliferation of signs advertizing cheap books is a parallel increase in the percentage of visitors not looking for the kind of books that used to pay our rents, mortgages, bookies and bar tabs.
I think I'll put a 'rules of the house' sign in the window, not only because I know there are comparatively few people passionate about Long-run economics in India, but because there are increasingly dominant themes among 'buyers' creeping through the bookshops of Hay. Some of them will certainly need discouraging:
1. No, we don't have any children's annuals, nor do we want to buy any. We especially don't have any Thunderbirds yearbooks, and we also especially don't want tatty broken runs of Bunty, the Beezer, the Beano or even the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band.
2. We don't stock books by Chris Ryan, nor other made-to-go-with-mass-media military ramblings.
3. We don't have time to value books you've bought on Ebay before, during or after you found out what it was you thought you were doing buying them there in the first place, and had begun to hope someone like us would engage with your fantasy for your financial gain.
4. We're not remotely interested in what you've rescued from your next-door neighbour's skip just after it's been raining, but if you insist, we'd rather have a box-full of bathroom tile offcuts than your half-set of Churchill's Second World War, without dustwrappers. Put the Churchill on Ebay, and call them 'stunning'. (And add, "Due to weight, collection only. Please e-mail me for any rivetting but pointless questions you might have about vols. II, III and VI.")
5. There's only one Observer book on these premises - and that's because it's the one on heraldry. We bought a collection of heraldry, and it came with that lot. If you tell us you're looking for #49 in the Observer series, and it's the one about Jovian unicycles, then we'll be happy to believe you, but we won't be able to help you. And we don't buy Shire albums, period. The only series books we purchase habitually are the Everyman ones - even though they have an awful lot of writing, and no pictures in them.
6. If your uncle left you a book signed by Jimmy Greaves, then we sympathise, but we have no interest in developing a commercial relationship with you or with the item, even if spursman255 (feedback 94.3%) told you in the pub that it's worth at least a monkey. (If, however, you have the original match programme for Wales v New Zealand [1905] come in, and we'll make you a cup of tea.)
7. Apart from Mrs. Simpson and the rest of that unhappy tribe, the only Royal 'collectible' of the last century is Diana - and she's no longer really collectible, either. Things come, and things go. As to your Coronation souvenir albums/books/bits of mass-produced tat, if as a nation we'd had the foresight to prop up our colonial interests with firms who specialized in recycling printed aristocratic memorabilia, there'd still be a Raj.
8. Enid Blyton was, like most middle-aged male collectors of her type of 'literature', plain weird.
I think I'll put a 'rules of the house' sign in the window, not only because I know there are comparatively few people passionate about Long-run economics in India, but because there are increasingly dominant themes among 'buyers' creeping through the bookshops of Hay. Some of them will certainly need discouraging:
1. No, we don't have any children's annuals, nor do we want to buy any. We especially don't have any Thunderbirds yearbooks, and we also especially don't want tatty broken runs of Bunty, the Beezer, the Beano or even the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band.
2. We don't stock books by Chris Ryan, nor other made-to-go-with-mass-media military ramblings.
3. We don't have time to value books you've bought on Ebay before, during or after you found out what it was you thought you were doing buying them there in the first place, and had begun to hope someone like us would engage with your fantasy for your financial gain.
4. We're not remotely interested in what you've rescued from your next-door neighbour's skip just after it's been raining, but if you insist, we'd rather have a box-full of bathroom tile offcuts than your half-set of Churchill's Second World War, without dustwrappers. Put the Churchill on Ebay, and call them 'stunning'. (And add, "Due to weight, collection only. Please e-mail me for any rivetting but pointless questions you might have about vols. II, III and VI.")
5. There's only one Observer book on these premises - and that's because it's the one on heraldry. We bought a collection of heraldry, and it came with that lot. If you tell us you're looking for #49 in the Observer series, and it's the one about Jovian unicycles, then we'll be happy to believe you, but we won't be able to help you. And we don't buy Shire albums, period. The only series books we purchase habitually are the Everyman ones - even though they have an awful lot of writing, and no pictures in them.
6. If your uncle left you a book signed by Jimmy Greaves, then we sympathise, but we have no interest in developing a commercial relationship with you or with the item, even if spursman255 (feedback 94.3%) told you in the pub that it's worth at least a monkey. (If, however, you have the original match programme for Wales v New Zealand [1905] come in, and we'll make you a cup of tea.)
7. Apart from Mrs. Simpson and the rest of that unhappy tribe, the only Royal 'collectible' of the last century is Diana - and she's no longer really collectible, either. Things come, and things go. As to your Coronation souvenir albums/books/bits of mass-produced tat, if as a nation we'd had the foresight to prop up our colonial interests with firms who specialized in recycling printed aristocratic memorabilia, there'd still be a Raj.
8. Enid Blyton was, like most middle-aged male collectors of her type of 'literature', plain weird.
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