Richard Booth wore a tin-foil crown to his coronation, declaring his 'subjects' queens and knights at random
presented with a town like Hay-on-Wye—a sandstone cluster of some 2,000 souls guarded by a Norman castle, cradled in green Welsh hills and watered by the loveliest river in Britain—and were told to revive its fading economy, you might not think of a second-hand bookshop. The entrepreneurial flame seldom burns bright there. Outside, a few shelves open to the weather tempt you withand “Turnips for Fun and Profit”. Inside the stock is haphazard, unalphabetical, and sometimes in piles on the floor.
And books were a means to his glorious end: to make his home town stand proudly on its own two feet, freed from the shackles of the useless town council, the Welsh Tourist Board and the quangos of the Development Board for Rural Wales. Government bureaucrats had no idea how to make a town like Hay thrive. Everything they came up with—chain motels employing the slave-labour of the locals, theme parks, supermarkets selling them bad bland food—stripped away the distinctiveness of the place.
His demeanour was royal, right down to fits of royal pique; yet he was not a monarchist. He invoked the divine right of kings only as a perfect foil to the divine right claimed by officialdom. Democracy was his real love, as his rule showed. Almost everyone in town could have a post in his government. His drinking pals from The Rose and Crown made up his cabinet; the minister for social security had been on the dole for six years.
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