My kingdom of booksRichard Booth1999

Richard Booth has probably handled more books than anyone else alive. Shop by shop, he created the world's first Book Town in Hay-on-Wye, inspiring a movement that then spread to Europe and beyond. In this autobiography, he recounts his world-wide search for books, taking us fom gambling bookshops in Las Vegas to miners libraries in South Wales, from affluent monasteries in Hollywood to idyllic book Villages in deepest France. His insights into the trade are fascinating, his descrioptions of its eccentric charaters witty and revealing. He also tells the story of Hay-on-Wye, a small town on the Welsh-English border that became a Mecca for book enthusiasts and collectors from all over the world. The hilarious events surrounding the town's Declaration of Independence form Great Britain are described, as are the author's more serious thoughts about rural regeneration. Richard Booth offers many refections on a societ increasingly centralized and dominated by distant authority wherther bureaucratic or capitalistic. His views are controversial, provocative but unfailingly enteraining. Monarchic, anarchic, socialist and separatist, he is politically incorrect four times over-and a rare free spirit in a world of increasing orthodoxy