Hay-on-Wire

Re-brands, Firebrands and Two-man-bands

2009-05-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

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."

Private Eye, no. 1232, 20 March - 2 April 2009

2009-03-19T04:58:00.000-07:00

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)

An Appeal

2009-03-03T04:59:00.000-08:00

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.

Something from the Office of the Witchfinder General

2009-01-11T04:41:00.000-08:00

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.

A Revolution?

2008-12-11T11:12:00.000-08:00

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)

A Revolution, Please

2008-09-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Rules of the House

2008-08-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

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.

A Wigging from Jezza

2008-06-02T15:38:00.000-07:00

The terrible rain should have been catastrophic for ice cream sellers at the Hay Festival, but there were relieving reports that business didn't suffer from the utilitarian British tendency to match food groups to weather patterns: stews in winter, salads in summer, and all that lower-class malarkey. Only one bad report about local produce threatens to sour the experiences of most happy customers. "Top writer", Jeremy Clarkson, thought that the sheep's milk ice cream had a nutritional value equivalent to licking Arthur Scargill's hair. If Jeremy isn't too bothered about the distasteful parallels he's feeding his readers for breakfast, and if he insists on pinching critical foodie work from his chum, A.A. Gill, then here are a few ideas to keep him going in a new column: I'm told that Ray Buckton's toenail clippings were reminiscent of the bits of burnt lasagne that stick to the sides of unwashed earthenware, Bill Morris's old silver fillings were evocative of the flyaway bits of scrag-end shrapnel in anybody's grandmother's mutton casserole, and the ear wax that used to collect on the rubber-end of Rodney Bickerstaffe's pencils was as heavenly as honey drizzled over the thighs of a Botticelli angel. Not forgetting, of course, the caviar of collective human effort, those big green bogies found in the snout of any reasonably mature, provincial union official. These last sweetmeats are still absolutely delightful, and are the true origin of the phrase, 'a good nose'.

Mad Love in Hay

2008-06-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

When I got to Hay Castle State Room to see John Richardson's Mad Love: Explorations in Desire 1996-2005, there were only two copies of the accompanying limited edition booklets left for sale. Being 49 years old, I bought #49, and only later did I twig this weirdly self-obsessive numerical compliance to be contrary to spirit of the exhibition. Just to explain, I was a recidivous apologist for symmetry, and I suspect the cause lay in my early failures with junior school collage projects. Instead of what I took to be my own striking work dominating the centre of things, I was mostly relegated to the unwashed fringes, my grubby, grey-paper contributions curling up in contact with the heating pipes nearer the dusty parquet. Since then, I've needed just about everything in the visual arts to be immediately prone to interpretation, framed properly, squarely, and healthily.

My own education aside, the brutal truth is I've never felt easy with the 'difficult stuff', with enigmas, spiritual or artistic, and anything I've learned up to now has been got during a long struggle through what a Surrealist might call my undergrowth. My constricted development has made me inadequate in clearing and mapping my own path of desire. The art is helping a little here, and it's more seamless in its effect because I know a few things about the artist. John Richardson is a hopelessly sane and balanced man with a helplessly insane and radical view, and he's slowly knocked away at least a little of the gesso from the rigid proscenia I was always pleased to call my mind. A real headcase wouldn't be able to do that, because my mistrust would keep me at a distance. It's why I don't like Dali.

The Mad Love collages are the right thing for Hay Castle, chiefly because since the brief, infantile appearance of Christopher Dawson in the 1880s, and the (shall we say) ordered 'mindset' of the incumbent châtelaine, nothing really establishment in tone has happened there. From the present meetings of the SWP and visits from Arthur Scargill, to the small Sidney Nolan (accepted part-ex for a collection of Ruskin) that used to decorate Richard Booth's office, there's nearly always been a vague undertone of intellectual, anti-intellectual, or political rebellion. I think of John Richardson's collages as a a guide to his rebellious inclinations, but those thoughts might be with me as a substitute for the fact that I never saw him being carted off in a Black Maria during his previous life as an active Trotskyite.

It's easy to look at some Spanish text in an interwar collage and believe there's a sub-text, an ideology. Consequently, my feeling that collage is probably best as a political medium is tough to shake; also I have ridiculously Romantic notions about fighting Franco seventy years after the event, and deep past affinities with guitars and glasses of wine. Now, quite unfairly, I tend to ascribe political theories to just about any collages with a hint of a period feel. Maybe I shoudn't say so, but I have difficulty separating what's being shown here from what I believe to be the political experiences of the artist; that John Richardson has an honourable track-record in left-wing activism makes it even harder to suppress my probably unwarranted prejudices. If that's an easy get-out from wondering what any of the exhibition means, I'm sorry, but it's the only relevant question I find possible to think about. I need still more education on this.

Any questions I have about the poetry are easier to answer because the poet's provocation can be seen closer to the surface; more accurately, closer to the poet. Nevertheless, it's scarcely accessible to traditional literary criticism, and although it is open to cod-Freudian interpretation, it can only be read easily and pleasantly without it. Actually, just about anything is better without that psycho stuff. The artist's (but not the poet's) life goes on in a degree of order disproportionate to the technique of his art. The poems carry on in their own, nearly-ordered, almost-meaning life, dense in sexual images and practical conundrums, and unlike the collages, they can be felt more easily from a distance, in hindsight. The collages and the poems are good foils for each other. The collages are proper in public, and the poems are publicly improper. The written stuff looks vitally personal, although assessed in tandem with the apparently irrational images on the wall, it's the sort of thing that might have been written by John Wilmot, had he been able to subsume some of the more outré artistic elements of the Fourth Republic. In the style of Wilmot's supposed dying recantation, John Richardson might one day accede to the biggest ideas of the supernatural, although I wouldn't put the price of admission on it.

A few years ago, for a small fee, I sold a book of Eluard's poems with drawings by Picasso, and as it passed though my hands I felt virtually nothing emotional, even less than I felt about the stone-cold banknotes that came back instead. Now I feel better, a little liberated. Thanks, John: I'll never understand precisely what it is you understand about Breton, Eluard and Ernst, but that's part of your point, isn't it? At least some of the canopy is visible, now, and I'm left with only one problem: I'm happy I can interpret the reasons for my own thoughts, but with you, I just can't guess. Which is the alter-ego, the man or the artist? Ask that, and I might as well ask for a large portion of Freud cod.

Where's Drif?

2008-05-31T00:44:00.000-07:00

It's surprising, but the Festival has never had anything remotely to do with the prosaic trade of successfully selling secondhand books. That's been a rare observation down the years in Hay-on-Wye, although it was true when Roy Strong and the mayoral entourage blocked the Bullring traffic on the eve of first Festival, and it's true now. It's become wholly against the interests of Hay to imagine that publishing for national consumption (a highly capitalized process), and secondhand bookselling to an international market for the benefit of a local economy (an extremely poor faux-relation), can exist as two parts of one idea. Very simply, old books and new books are such distant cousins, so many times removed, they can only be mistaken as belonging to the same species.

The mantra of the best of the old booksellers in Chicago, John Chandler, was that new books and old books are as like as apples and oranges, and John was never liberal with the tripe and onions. Although he never visited Hay, John would have clearly seen the Festival for what it isn't, and not what it is. The Festival isn't a local resource, to be rolled out to the cheers of otherwise cash-strapped hicks with nothing better to do than follow the Sky line for a couple of weeks in the year, and then to retire like a gaggle of cidered-up peasantry in yonder meadow, a lost troupe from Miss Julie, pouring away the profits through long and lazy summer nights.

Ours can be a lonely and largely sober job, and the business carries on like coal-mining, out of media scrutiny for most of the time. In consequence, breaking canapés with Booker Prize short-listers, sometimes even winners, is an unusual hobby for the rump of our tribe. Secondhand booksellers don't habitually lionize literati; as a group, we sensibly leave the business of selling new books and newly-signed new books to the professionals in the field. I suspect those among us who can't avoid the lure of organizing public signing sessions are genetically similar, if not identical to the Literace, a species delineated by Drif in a once moderately famous and now mostly forgotten guide to secondhand bookshops in the British Isles. "To rhyme with Liberace", he said, these people have shops which "are extremely showy, very flash and unnecessarily expensive." Drif sometimes gleefully sliced through a lot of pretension with bracing candour.

Perhaps we should discourage the practice of oiling the market for instant collectables by legally requiring publishers to put critically honest blurb on dustwrappers; it would certainly have the effect of cutting down on all the self-congratulatory parties. A periodic dose of cold custard in the eye for the successful few might even temper the proliferation of the large mass of published but forgotten authors, whose works are arranged by the ton in shops which make you wonder if Poundstretcher has acquired Borders. Not only would my plan be artistically useful, it would also be a downright ecologically sensible. Is Drif available, does anyone know?

Hitchens for a Fight

2008-05-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

We're lucky in Hay. The frequent late-night carousing and cursing on just about any of our streets might not be intellectually polemical in origin, possibly not to cultured taste, but it's free and unticketed. I'll concede that the anticipation of an infrequent brawl doesn't indicate a sane outlook, but there are some things which appear to have less sense. One of those is queuing to provoke Christopher Hitchens into swearing at you under canvas, in earshot of hordes of his acolytes. That sounds to me like an almost indescribably baroque perversion, like paying to be whipped by the squire while his chums from the Hellfire Club (modern incarnation, immoveable feast) and assorted media sponsors lay bare your wheals to a wider public. Some people will do almost anything for money, and some people, often unaccountably, will do almost anything to give it away.

Banking on Oscar

2008-05-30T03:34:00.001-07:00

Because its own interests are inimical to the generation and maintenance of local reputations, and in response to a slowly developing realization about which side their bread is most thickly buttered, this year the Hay Festival organizers have allowed a monolithic financial institution to give us a short turn as a literary critic. Rising to the creative challenge, Barclays has presented a new juxtaposition of ideas: Oscar Wilde, runs the reminder, knew that the soul is the repository of real riches, while the bank's own mundane expertise is available to help you "enjoy your wealth". I didn't know there's a substantial connexion between a loveably roguish writer and the notion of profitably managing my global financial strategies in the age of deregulation, but Barclays Wealth have made it for me. Their offering of a whole-of-life dialectic for the New Millennium is going to have a profound effect on the way I think.

Instinctively feeling their way around unfamiliar subject matter, perhaps Barclays' ad-people were themselves subliminally affected by Wilde's subtle talents for self-promotion, or maybe they were merely pumped up by the thought of his Astrakhan trimmings. Whichever it was, their programme advertisement has made me voraciously keen to have them shovel all my spare scratch into an exciting foreign venture, but they'll have to forgive me for a couple of days while I traipse off to the the railway station to look for my handbag.

Hay Festival 2008

2008-05-29T07:32:00.000-07:00

A growing breed of naysayers and critics are now reminding us that the Festival used to engender cuddly relationships, not only in the spiritually nutritious communion of reader and writer, but also between the event itself and the town it had chosen to live in. It was intimate in both mystical and mechanical senses. Now, we have a rather sophisticated festival of publishing, and not what might be taken for a festival of literature, or literary festival, as it was once described. I think there's a difference between the last two, but it's probably easier to understand Diane Keaton telling Woody Allen in Love and Death, that she's scared, but not frightened of dying. Or is it the other way round?

Anyway, the mysticism between producer and consumer is purportedly still present in Hay, but it feels like a different kind, almost characterized by decree and not consent. The mechanics of the event are unrecognizable from the past: before, it was like the Monaco Grand Prix, a track partly in town, with the locals almost as close to the action as the spectators and stewards; now, it's along the sterner lines of the Shanghai International Circuit, built on larger piles of corporate money, but with at least one obvious difference: instead of being raised on reclaimed swampland, the Festival is beginning to look like a refugee village thrown up before the reclamation project was finished. Given that the present site has a lease stretching close to infinity, there will always be the danger of an abrupt return to soggy nature, unless the event can be rescheduled to a safer slot, maybe the middle of February. It's also sad that the racing allusions aren't entirely accidental. If anyone has paddled away from Hay-on-Wye this year still believing the two 'ideas' of publishing and literature to be closely related components in the exercise, they should remember that the 2008 Festival brochure awarded "top writer" status to.....Jeremy Clarkson. Whoever compiled these programme notes seems to have an attenuated idea about what makes a genuine literatus; either that, or they have real advertizing balls and a lack of familiarity with other authors, because that's what's needed to put such glossy hokum before the public without fear of physical reprisal.