Addyman Books

If Richard Booth's is the grand institution of Hay bookselling, Addyman Books is its characterful heart — a rambling, over-stuffed secondhand shop a few doors down Lion Street, opened by Derek Addyman and Anne Brichto in 1987 and run by them ever since. The Addymans are Hay booksellers of the old school, with a good eye and a sense of humour: they run this shop, a crime-and-horror specialist called Murder and Mayhem with a chalk-outline body on the floor, and the Addyman Annexe besides — three shops between them, each with its own personality. The pleasure here is the browse: crooked shelves, unexpected corners, the sense that the next book you pull might be the one. In a town full of bookshops, Addyman's is the one regulars are most fond of. Nearly forty years of two people selling books they love, in the town that made a religion of it.