This place sits at the top of my WANNA GO! list since seeing it mentioned on the travel thread last year.
Wanna go?
LEISURE WEEKEND EUROPE
Towns With High-Volume Appeal
By DON W. PRINCE
SPECIAL TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 8, 2004
It's a book lover's vision of heaven on earth: a place where you walk down the street and pass one bookstore after another, each with rows upon rows of books stacked floor to ceiling. Even the streets are lined with shelves of old books. Cafés and pubs welcome patrons to sit for hours reading. And, after a few days, you leave with suitcases crammed with literary finds.
It exists, and we spent a long weekend there. It is the book town of Hay-on-Wye, in WALES just over the border from England. This village of 1,300 has 39 stores selling new and used books, from intimate shops to cavernous places like the Cinema Bookstore (200,000 used titles housed in a former movie theater). There are rare bookshops and "Every Book One Pound" stores. Shelves on the streets are filled with old hardbacks, each for 50 pence (88 U.S. cents or 72 European cents), and "honor boxes" to drop coins in. Charming inns, pubs and restaurants fill the town center. (My librarian wife, Cheryl, and I stopped a number of times at the Blue Boar Pub to browse new purchases over pints of ale.) Each summer over 80,000 literary enthusiasts flock to the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts (May 27 to June 5. See www.hayfestival.com1.)..... |
