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.