Product Description

A bibliophile's pilgrimage to where book lovers go when they die-Hay-on-Wye.

Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside-to move, in fact, to the little cobblestone village of Hay-on-Wye, the 'Town of Books' that boasts fifteen hundress inhabitants-and forty bookstores. Antiquarian bookstores, no less.

Hay's newest citizens accordingly take up residence in a sixteenth-century apartment over a bookstore, meeting the village's large population of misfits and bibliomaniacs by working for world-class eccentric Richard Booth-the self-declared King of Hay, owner of the local castle, and proprietor of the world's largest and most chaotic used book warren. A useless clerk, Paul delights in shifting dusty stacks of books around and sifting them for ancient gems like Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable, Confessions of an Author's Wife, and I Was Hitler's Maid. He also duly fulfills his new duty as a citizen by simultaneously applying to be a Peer in the House of Lords and attempting to buy Sixpence House, a beautiful and neglected old tumbledown pub for sale in the town's center.

Taking readers into a secluded sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through the creation of his own book, Sixpence House becomes a meditation on what books means to us, and how their meaning can still resonate long after they have been abandoned by their public. Even as he's writing, the knowledge of where his work will eventually end up-rubbing bindings with the rest of the books that time forgot-is a curious kind of comfort.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #710697 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Hay-on-Wye, a Welsh town of 1,500, is heaven on earth for people who love books, especially old books. It has 40 bookstores, and if you can't find what you want in one of them, you can fork over 50 pence and visit the field behind the town castle, where thousands more long-forgotten books languish under a sprawling tarp. McSweeney's contributor Collins moved his wife and baby son from San Francisco to Hay a few years ago, intending to settle there. This book is Collins's account of the brief period when he organized American literature in one of the many used-book stores, contemplated and abandoned the idea of becoming a peer in the House of Lords, tried to buy an affordable house that wasn't falling apart (a problem when most of the buildings are at least a century old) and revised his first book (Banvard's Folly). Collins can be quite funny, and he pads his sophomore effort with obscure but amusing trivia (how many book lovers know that the same substance used to thicken fast-food milk shakes is an essential ingredient in paper resizing?), but it's hard to imagine anyone beyond bibliophiles and fellow Hay-lovers finding enough here to hold their attention. Witty and droll though he may be, Collins fails to give his slice-of-life story the magic it needs to transcend the genre.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The McSweeney's gang may be the closest thing we have to a genuine literary circle; if its members have produced smug, postmodern chapter titles, such as "Chapter Two relies on the travelogue cliche of a garrulous cabdriver," they've also written some books that whistle like fresh air through the bookstore. Collins' travelogue/memoir is a book lover's delight, minus the pretense you might expect from someone schooled in obscure eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. With his wife and young son, he moves to Hay-on-Wye, Wales, a village with one bookstore for every 37.5 residents. The narrative is structured around his house-buying attempts and the impending publication of his first book, but the meat of the work lies in his meandering asides and bookstore discoveries. His intellect changes focus often, but crisply, and it's a pleasure to observe him in the act of observation: Who would have thought there was still new ground to cover on the topic of Anglo-American differences? Collins muses often on the impermanence of books, but this one will grace shelves for years to come. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Praise for Banvard's Folly 'A splendid little book.'

Customer Reviews

An Absolute Delight
I fell in love with "Sixpence House" from the opening pages. It's not a travelogue, yet it gives the reader a wonderful sense of the place called Hay-on-Wye; it's not a guidebook for those publishing their first book, although we do share some of the labor pangs as Collins' first tome, the also wonderful "Banvard's Folly" advances to press; and it's not a compendium of unusual finds in forgotten books, though you'll find plenty of these here. If you demand a straightforward, linear sort of narrative, you might not love this. But if you enjoy sharing the keen intellect, thrill of discovery and gentle, wry wit of another bibliophile, you most certainly will. No lover of the printed word should pass it by.

*The* book for bibliomaniacal Anglophiles
Paul Collins has written something like the perfect book for bibliomaniacal Anglophiles. *Sixpence House* is the story of his migration--with wife and infant son--from San Francisco to Hay-on-Wye, a village in the Welsh countryside with some 1500 inhabitants--and, remarkably, 40 bookstores. Hay is a picturesque town, with cobblestone streets and thatch-roofed houses and its own castle, a half-ruined edifice occupied by Hay's self-proclaimed king, who happens to be, as are so many of Hay's inhabitants, a bookseller. Collins and his family rent an apartment in town (his mailing address becomes, simply, The Apartment: it's that small a village) and live out of their suitcases and stroller while house hunting and book buying. The author also works part-time for the king in his bookstore, a place crammed with more musty volumes than the royal's workers can ever organize.

Collins' attempt to buy an old house in Hay--he toys with purchasing the eponymous Sixpence House, a lopsided former pub that threatens to be a money pit--merely provides the skeleton for the author's delightful, meandering narrative. It is at times hilarious, as when, for example, Collins describes his first book-reading, or rather, his pre-reading sojourn in the bathroom:

"There's nowhere dry for me to put my papers down, so I have to tuck my papers under my chin while I pee, which works till--chiff--into the toilet, and I grab, and recoil, then grab again--and I have saved my manuscript, the thing I am still hoping to read from this evening, except for the first page, which is not just soaked, it is soaked with urine. I stand alone in the bathroom, horrified. I do not have another copy with me. But, what they do have here is--a hand dryer. And so there I stand, drying off my masterpiece over the ineffectual vent. It takes a long time. Someone finally walks in on my performance art, and there I am, drying my pee-soaked words--Hello, top of the evening to you. Finally I give up and throw the whole thing out."

In addition to urine-soaked manuscripts, there are recycled gravestones to read about, and near poisonous glasses of cider, and lyrical vomiting, and scheming Lords, and, everywhere, a bibliophile's revelry in old books. Collins, moreover, can write. Each page offers some beautifully or wittily phrased nugget for the reader to savor. (On the idea "that a character can develop a will of his own and 'take over a book,'" Collins writes: "A character can no more take over your novel than an eggplant and a jar of cumin can take over your kitchen.") One can lament only that the book is not twice as long.

(Actually, one can lament something else, but *read no further* if you have not either read or written the book: I was convinced that the author would end up buying Sixpence House and living out an idyllic, writerly life among the eccentrics of Hay. Indeed, though all indications suggested otherwise, I was sure the last chapter would end with either Paul or his wife coming to his or her senses and announcing that, money be damned, they wanted that house! But, it didn't happen. The book ended well, tidily, that nice bit with the problematic passport and the affirmation of Paul's status, but I was unaccountably heartsick about it.)

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

Bill Bryson meets Nicholson Baker
Sixpence House is a wonderful, strange, unclassifiable classic. The basic story is a travelogue, from San Francisco to London to a medieval town on the Welsh border. But the pastoral scenery and odd locals are really just Collins' jumping-off point, into the mysterious hidden worlds within long-forgotten books. The result is the literary equivalent of the kind of dinner party guest everyone wants to sit next to.