Hay-on-Wye (& Arthur's Stone)

Hay-on-Wye- "the town of books."  The description says it all.  Just over the border in Wales, Hay-on-Wye is a wonderful little town with 23 second-hand and antiquarian book shops (not to mention 2 bookbinders).
The town is small- population under 1500- and the bookshops are all within close proximity.  As you'd expect, you can find anything and everything related to books.  You have specialty shops, general shops, strange shops, you name it.  It's amazingly awesome for bibliophiles.  If you're not a book lover, your time would be better spent elsewhere, though it is still a charming town.

Walk in any of the bookshops and you can pick up a town map that shows where each shop is located (along with a brief description of the specialty of each).  On Sunday (when we went), some of the shops are closed, but it's still a worthwhile experience.  I was able to visit 6-7 of the stores (and had to be dragged out of each one); my favorites are:
 - Hay-on-Wye Booksellers (#13 on the map)
- The Addyman Annexe (#15)
- Hay Cinema Bookshop (#21); the largest shop I've ever seen, stocking over 200,000 secondhand books

Outside of Thrift stores, I had never been to secondhand bookshops in the States, and it is a great experience.  It's not just about finding a given title- it's about finding a certain edition of a given title.  To maximize your enjoyment of the day, I recommend writing down a few titles you'd like to buy, then go through the shops looking at the different editions of those titles available in each one.  Prices are generally low, if you don't want the first-edition signed copies, but can vary widely- so check several stores first.

Entering the town

Books!

Hay Castle

The town clocktower

Looked promising, but it was closed :-(

The cinema bookshop- largest I'd ever seen

Note the stone set between the two middle windows- "stone house."  Very helpful- I had mistook it for a bridge.

While you're in the area, check out Arthur's Stone- just 10 miles east of Hay-on-Wye, in England.  It's a neolithic burial chamber.  It's pretty cool, for a pile of rocks.  Like many ancient remains in the area, legend has tied it to Arthur, though Arthur is believed to exist around 500 AD, some 3500 years after the chamber was built, so I'll leave it to the reader to judge the potential accuracy of the claim.

Arthur's Stone

Rating: A