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.