Some years ago the utility room in our house was full of shelves overflowing with books. Then along came the all powerful triumvirate of kids, kitchen and Kindle and all the books went (along with all my LPs). Over the years there has been a pang of regret for the loss of both books and records and now with the children leaving or taking up less space we are beginning to reverse the process.
Hay is famous for one thing and that is the abundance of second hand book shops and so a trip here is a quick and easy way to restock the shelves. After a hearty full breakfast at the Bear we set off out to see what we could find.
There are about 20 book shops in Hay, with some specialising in areas that weren’t of great interest to us, but we still managed to visit 90% of them. To my mind the best of the lot is Booth’s which is the original shop that started it all. Not only has it got a great selection of books it is well laid out in an interesting building. In the end we returned there at least three times and bought on each occasion.
I had a list of items that I wanted to find whereas Helen was just happy to browse. It was surprising how little I managed to cross off the list in the end but I did increase my H.E. Bates collection as you can see from the picture below.
At the final reckoning we ended up with 12 books and 2 LPs which will make a small step towards rebuilding the library. No doubt we will be back to Hay again in the future to top it up!
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