People ask me why a shop in Bredasdorp ships books to the other side of the world, and the honest answer is: Hay-on-Wye ruined me.
It’s a small town on the Welsh border with more secondhand bookshops than seems physically reasonable — you can lose an entire day wandering between them and come out blinking into the evening with a bag too heavy to carry comfortably and no memory of buying half of what’s in it. I went once, meaning to stay two nights, and stayed five.
What struck me wasn’t really the size of it. It was that nobody there seemed to think a small town and a serious bookshop were a contradiction. So when I finally opened my own, in a much smaller town, on the other side of the planet, that’s the bit I wanted to borrow — not the scale, just the idea that you don’t need a big city to take books seriously.
If you’ve been to Hay, or somewhere like it, tell me about it — the contact page is right there, or start a thread in the Book Club. I’m always collecting excuses for the next trip.