Richard Booth'sBookshop

Hay-on-Wye is the town that books built, and Richard Booth is the reason. He began buying and selling secondhand books here in the early 1960s, filled the town's empty buildings with them, and — half stunt, half serious point about rural decline — declared Hay an independent kingdom with himself as king in 1977. The bookshop that carries his name is the flagship of it all: a huge, handsome shop on Lion Street with a cinema and café attached, tens of thousands of books across every subject, the kind of place you enter meaning to spend twenty minutes and leave two hours later. Booth sold up in 2007 and Elizabeth Haycox owns and runs it now, having restored the building and kept the ambition. Hay has around forty bookshops; this is the one to start with — the shop that started the whole improbable enterprise, in a small town on the Welsh border that turned reading into an industry.