We finally made it into Hay-on-Wye today, a town that is technically Welsh but spiritually a bookshop. It is beautiful, worn and dog-eared and just a little eccentric… full of art and crooked lanes.
There are bookshops (of course), but also galleries, specialist shops, and cafés that are all very nice without being offensively fancy. We even managed to find a correctly proportioned long black… proof that at least someone in the UK understands coffee doesn’t need to be served in vast quantities.
It’s impossible to walk around the town without stepping on the legacy of Richard Booth, the self-proclaimed “King of Hay,” who once issued a tongue-in-cheek Declaration of Independence (from what, exactly, no one is quite sure). Hay is the sort of place that makes you want to linger for a weekend, probably buy a stack of books you don’t need, and tell everyone back home you were browsing in the world’s biggest library that happens to also be a curious and picturesque village.
The Obligatory Blog 