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Hay-on-Wye – Lioness at Large

Hay-on-Wye

… minus the book festival, but anyway.  Book town writ large.

So there I was, nicely pacing myself (read: trying hard at least not to enter every single book store I was passing) —

… but then this happened, and my self-control was toast:

I left the store with, among other things, the better part of Michael Jecks’s Knights Templar series (to the extent I haven’t already read it, that is, obviously) and a few other books in addition.

“Chalky,” the murder victim chalk outline figure lying so conveniently at the bottom of the True Crime section, was taken about town by a local artist, incidentally (I’d have paid anything for postcards of these images, but there weren’t any, so I had to content myself with taking photos of photos):

Oh, and just in case you’re wondering, like pretty much every self-respecting town in the Welsh borderland Hay-on-Wye does have a castle, too, and true to form it did get razed (or nearly, anyway) a couple of times in the various Welsh-English wars and the English Civil War … but who needs a castle when you have book stores?!  (It’s intended to be made another book-related fixture of the town, though, so that should be interesting.)

Last but not least and for the sake of visual context: This is what you drive through on your way to booktown central.

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Blogging Series: LitScapes

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/1584546/hay-on-wye

 

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Comments on BookLikes:

0 thoughts on “Hay-on-Wye

  1. I recall going to Hay the early 90s for the Hay Festival, when there were small intimate tents holding 20-30 people and Van Morrison playing to 300. I was shocked when I went last time; audiences of 100s, large TV screens so the audience could see and the town over-saturated with throngs and throngs of people. Oh for the halcyon days before such events created their monster and when we didn’t have social media to invite the whole world and his (or her) wife. I remember a particular funny episode. Everytime one spotted and smelled a heap of animal dung it seemed to regenerate no matter how fast the cleaners shoveled it…

    How was everything this time round? Lots of people as well? I also remember the bookshops, but not their names. I’d have to look them up in my physical picture albums…

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