An American in Paris . . . and Britain XI: The Biggest City in the World
Hay-on-Wye is the biggest city in the world 
if the ideas contained in a city available for purchase measure the size of the city. Actually they don’t, but it feels that way when you are in this nearly perfect place which is dedicated to books. . . used, hardly used, and new in mounds and shelves and barns without a Noble.
Hay-on-Wye contains the most used bookstores I have ever seen in one place. In the Age of Amazon, it is quaint to get excited about the ability to shop for hundreds of used books in person, but it is just more fun to touch the books you are buying . . . or to spend hours grazing over the stacks of books.
I am confident that I could have gotten it all on-line, but where is the joy in that?
Hope and I had a splendid time in Hay-on-Wye. We held hands, ate good cheese and bread, and browsed in musty basements of books when it rained. At the end of the day, we had a nice long bus ride home with happy Torrey students comparing book finds, reading lovely poetry, and singing ancient hymns. Is there a better day?
The book was printed in 1901 when Victoria died. I opened it and saw a print of the young Victoria and was transported back in time. Just touching the book was a pleasure with its slick pages and stately prose.
These men could write myth while dealing with history, by comparison we cannot write even history in mythic times. It sits in my home now waiting the rebirth of the West.
Opening a copy of the Prayer Book reminds you of how common possessions have become. This book had been passed down from the early nineteenth century at least four times. Each owner gently wrote his or her name in the book and knew that he would have it only for a short time. Another knee would bow holding it and pray to be washed in the precious Blood of Christ. Another would marry a “dearly beloved” holding the gilding, a bit rough now. Surely more than one Victorian saw it daily and then at the hour of her death.
Now it waits for me to hand it to my sons and daughters. We have rescued it from a basement shelf and sent it back to the hands of belief.
When I hold it, the faith of those before is joined with mine and I feel the union of the men and women of the West who have believed. These are dark times, but they knew darker. The Book survived and it will do so again. It is a testament of, no, to hope.
Books incarnate words in ways that computer screens do not. The ink is there and in a very old book is the work of heavy type pressing on a page.
I have a Strand with Conan Doyle in it! Not Holmes, but still Doyle and when it was first held Doyle was alive and the final adventures of the great detective had not come from his brain. No copy glowing from a screen can do what this link to history does.
Reading the children’s magazines and family magazines of an earlier time reminds me of what we have gained and lost. Civility is gone and the ability to trust each other with unlocked doors, but children died of racking coughs we could cure now . . . and it is all there in a book with no irony, no knowledge of the time to come even hinted in the format or the copy.
Carrying those few books out of Hay-on-Wye back to La Mirada felt like taking them on my back (literally!) to a safer place. The Turks are again at the door of Europe and here in the friendly West near the final resting place of Reagan they can sit safe for a time.
I assume that there is a slow chain of loss that leads a book to Hay-on-Wye. First the original Victorian clutches the book and is thankful. Then his daughter receives it and grows old with the Good Queen. She dies and hands it on to an Edwardian son who leaves it on a shelf too nostalgic to destroy it too full of Darwinian doubts to use it. And then it becomes simply Old and a few generations of the family keep it just to recollect what was. . . taking it down perhaps in the terrors of two world wars, but forgetting it in the rush of the fall of Empires and the death of civilizations. At last an estate sale comes where some poor sod sells it for a bit of money in a lot of old books and it comes to sit in the basement of Hay-on-Wye. There Hope finds it, the transplanted Fairest Flower in All Christendom, and picks it up. She opens it, reads, and believes.
Do the books in Hay-on-Wye eventually meet the flames? Somewhere in some back alley is the last copy of Professor Snerdlove’s “A Birders Guide and Key to the Bible with Helpful Receipts from Atlantis” perishing in the fire? Is there a moment when all the hopes of a Book of Common Prayer, all the weddings and burials are forgotten, in an Inferno? When the last copy of a Victorian children story of indifferent quality is burned does anyone need to care?
Or are the ideas released? Does the fire cleanse them of any mediocrity in their execution and do they fly upward to the higher fire? Do they join the stars and pushed by love circle the earth better than they were? Is any hate or silliness lost and only the love preserved?
In Hay-on-Wye there are books to burn and books to keep, if only for a little while. Some vanish this plane and others sustain us. America needs such a place, because there are books that deserve the dignity of such final shelving.
The Bible before me. . . my grandfathers will never go to Hay-on-Wye. It was given to me by him and has been used at every Torrey graduation, honoring that old saint as best I can. Nothing is forever and someday it too will perish . . . and I can only hope its final burial place is as perfect and fitting as that town just over the border in Wales: the biggest city by far I have ever seen.