Hay's bookshops by speciality

Hay's shops are best understood by what they sell, not by where they stand. The centre is small: most of the shops below are within a few hundred metres of the Clock Tower, so the useful question is never which street but which subject. Start with what you collect, or what you read on holiday, and the town sorts itself.

The big general shops

Richard Booth's Bookshop on Lion Street is the one everyone has heard of. The building went up in 1886 as Robert Williams and Sons, the agricultural stores where farmers bought seed, ploughs, shears and fencing on market day. Richard Booth moved his books in here in 1982 and, by the shop's own telling, built miles of shelving and proclaimed it the largest bookshop in the world, a claim the shop itself now hedges with "which might even have been true". He sold the business in 2007 and died in 2019. Today it runs over three floors: literature, theology, science and art upstairs among the sofas; new fiction, nature, children's books and a craft and gift section on the ground floor; romance, comics and manga in the basement. New and second-hand books share the shelves. It opens 9.30am to 5.30pm Monday to Saturday and 11am to 5pm on Sunday.

Hay Cinema Bookshop on Castle Street is the old picture house, turned into a bookshop in 1965, which makes it the longest established of the big shops on its own account. The stock is put at about 200,000 volumes from art to zoology, priced from 50p to thousands of pounds, and the bargain shelves sit outside in the garden in front. Francis Edwards, antiquarian booksellers since 1855, trade from the same building, so this is also where to look for something old and serious.

Addyman Books at 39 Lion Street is the warren. Derek Addyman and Anne Brichto opened in 1987 in a ten-foot room at the Blue Boar, moved to Lion Street six months later, and the shop has spread through room after room on two floors since. The owners describe their line as English literature and modern first editions at fair prices. There is a third Addyman shop, the Annexe, for the beat writers, poetry, philosophy and art.

The specialists

This is where Hay earns a second day.

• Crime: Murder and Mayhem, across Lion Street from Addyman's and opened by the same family in 1997. Detective fiction from A to Z, true crime, horror and ghost stories, with long runs of green Penguins, Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes behind a painted shopfront you will recognise when you see it. The town directory says it closes at lunchtime Monday to Thursday. Its sister shop, Christie and Doyle, takes the Golden Age and cosy crime.
• Science fiction and fantasy: Bookshop 451 at 10 High Town, one of the newer shops, with dystopian fiction, a smattering of horror and some first editions and collectables.
• Natural history: C. Arden on Forest Road, a short walk south of the centre. Around 15,000 books on natural history, botany, birds, insects, gardening and beekeeping, and a strong run of the New Naturalist series. Mind the hours: 9.30am to 5pm Monday to Friday and 9.30am to noon on Saturday, and the shop is not open on Sunday.
• A small, chosen stock: Green Ink Booksellers in Grove House, opened in October 2018 by Joshua and Ellen Boyd Green after three years running Alice's Bookshop in Melbourne. Modern firsts, poetry, art, history, philosophy and Folio Society, and they will search for a title or order a new one.

The honesty shelves

The Hay Castle Trust describes the castle as home of the world's first honesty bookshop: shelves of cheap books you pay for by leaving the money.

How to do it

Park once on Oxford Road, opposite the castle; there is no point moving the car. A sensible loop runs down Lion Street (Booth's, Addyman's, Murder and Mayhem), across High Town (Bookshop 451, Green Ink), round to Castle Street for the Cinema Bookshop, and out along Forest Road to Arden's if natural history is your thing. Go on a Thursday and the market is in the middle of it all from 9am to 2.30pm.

Opening hours are where Hay catches people out. Only Booth's and Arden's print their hours on their own websites. The rest publish none there, so we do not quote them; if a particular shop matters to you, ring before you travel. Several shops buy books as well as sell them; Addyman's and Green Ink both ask you to get in touch first.

When you need a break from shelves, the cinema behind Richard Booth's on Brook Street has 48 seats and a bar, and the town's cafes are covered in our eating guide.