The Magus of Hay Read Online Free PDF

you wanted, without paying through the nose.
    Other book dealers moved in, and Booth bought the castle – part medieval, part mansion house, Jacobean through to Victorian – which also got filled up with books. Pretty soon, Hay had became a unique town with a whole new economic basis, a level of self-sufficiency unknown, not only in these parts, but anywhere in the UK.
    ‘Books had become like the currency of Hay.’
    ‘Well, yes,’ Betty said. ‘That’s nice, but—’
    ‘Nice? It was magic! And not in a pretentious way, because he wasn’t some nose-in-air, asshole-scholar type. At one stage, the books that nobody wanted, he even sold them as fuel… for burning?’
    ‘Would Mr Oliver be happy about that, you think?’
    ‘Oliver didn’t fit. Kapoor said that. Oliver was too Establishment. Booth’s Hay was outside all of that. He’d kick-started the economy of a town that was stagnating, and it was pulling visitors again – book tourists. OK, in a small way at first. Calls it trickle-tourism . The town doesn’t get swamped, it just builds steadily. But then the big guys get interested – the nationalchains, the Welsh development agencies, the Wales Tourist Board. Offering the kind of big money grants which your average entrepreneurs just grab and run with, milk the agencies for all they can get then move on when the grants dry up. But that…’
    Robin was on the edge of his chair cushion, his hair in spikes.
    ‘…was precisely what Booth did not do. Sees these agency guys with their chequebooks and their government support and their big shit-eating smiles, and he’s like, FUCK OFF!’
    Betty grinned. It was at times like this that Robin was able to forget his smashed pelvis, his wonky spine. She laid her head against his knees as he described how, as part of a battle to keep the town entirely local, beat off the national chains and the government agencies, Richard Booth and his supporters had decided that Hay, this ancient once-walled town which sat right on the border of Wales and England, should declare itself independent of both.
    And that he should be its king.
    Sure, it had started out as a kind of joke. There were Hay passports and HAY car-plates, and King Richard was bestowing honours on supporters, giving them Hay titles. Attracting the kind of free worldwide publicity that his powerful enemies on the tourist and development boards would’ve had to pay out millions for.
    A sharp elbow in the ribs of the Establishment. A defiant finger in the face of the organized politics.
    ‘Guy’s a goddamn genius.’
    Building on the fame, a father and son team from a neigh-bouring village, Norman and Peter Florence, had started a small festival of literature which, at first, Richard Booth opposed on the basis that it was promoting new rather than second-hand books. But within a few years – because things happened here – it was pulling in the best part of a hundred thousand people to hear the world’s greatest writers and thinkers. Finally winning Booth’s blessing around the time Bill Clinton had arrived in asmoke-glassed limo to address the world from a huge marquee in the grounds of Hay Castle, calling the festival the Woodstock of the Mind.
    And when the crowds went home and the tents came down, it was still this small, once-walled medieval town that sold cattle feed and local honey between the second-hand books.
    ‘But now something’s slipping away?’ Betty said.
    ‘Like everyplace. Greedy bankers, idiots in government, the Internet collapsing high streets. Then the King’s health breaks down and he doesn’t get to spend as much time here. The castle goes on the market, and now it’s in the hands of a trust which may or may not pull it together. And the ideas that took the town on to a new level are just… running down.’
    ‘So it needs… us?’
    Oh God. Robin was viewing his possible encounter with the King as a sign of converging destinies.
    ‘Needs people with commitment to more