Every book lover and collector needs to be freeway close to a town like Hay-on-Wye, Wales, a cobblestone village of 1500 inhabitants and over 40 bookstores which stock so many books that their sheer accumulated weight, according to the Paul Collins’ whimsical, witty and muse-worthy memoir Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, “has created its own gravitational pull.”
Oh sure, it would be great to be caught up in this kind of orbit just on general principle alone, but for me, with my own little force-field accumulation of printed matter to mind, here’s the real beauty of living in or near such a town: “You can leave a box of books out in the middle of the street in Hay, and no one gives it a second thought.”
Which sounds like a perfectly convenient no-muss, no-fuss solution to me, a mover and a shaker — okay, more like a mover and a mover — one who with each U-Haul uprooting and transplant has reluctantly left behind a trail of bread-crumbed books, of both the door stop or studious tome type, and all weighty and cumbersome enough to defeat my usual purpose of traveling light and low-budget. So with books strewn across such former clean, well-lighted-states of residence as Hawaii and Arizona, and all over California — including some stashed in a dilapidated barn on an old chicken farm in Northern California — the idea that someone could cavalierly leave their worries behind in the middle of the street for others to take on seems like a godsend for us lollygagger types. No more-trouble-than-its-worth garage sales, no donation hassles, none of those tiresome night-rally book burnings - boxes hit the main street cobblestones and you hit the highway.
That kind of impermanence is not what Paul Collins, an up-and-coming writer, with wife and young son, has in mind, however. When he pulls up San Francisco stakes to move the family to the Welsh countryside, Collins is looking to live long-term amidst the kind of antiquarian, obscure and oddball books he has such a passion for: ”first editions of Wodehouse, 1920s books in Swahili, 1970s books on macramé, pirated Amsterdam editions of Benjamin Franklin’s treatise on electricity.”
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