Sixpence House by Paul Collins

One of my favourite places in the world is Hay-on-Wye. Bibliophiles in the UK have probably been there, for it is a town of secondhand bookshops. Some are enormous, some are very niche, and the whole place is nestled in the beautiful Welsh/English border countryside. There’s that famous festival each year, but that doesn’t really hold a candle to the BOOKSHOPS.

I first went around 2003, I think, which is also when Paul Collins published his memoir Sixpence House. I’ve been ten or so times in the intervening years and I still love it, but each time there are fewer bookshops and more non-bookshops. Reading Sixpence House reminds me of its heyday, when there were 40+ bookshops and you couldn’t visit them all in a day.

I’ve seen plenty come and go over the years, with many seeming to last less than a year. I suppose the internet is the culprit, though it gives with one hand and takes with the other, as far as book-lovers are concerned. But it is still a glorious place – and that’s what brought Collins and his wife there in the early 2000s.

They’d been before, but now wanted to move there for good – or at least for a period. Neither of them are particularly drawn towards concrete, long-term plans. In a manner that wouldn’t feel possible were it not true, Collins manages to get a job at Richard Booth’s bookshop ‘sorting American books’, simply by loitering around and being American.

It’s a joy to read Collins’s love of books. He often goes on delightfully bookish tangents related to novels and memoirs he picks up in this job, or stray thoughts leading to other books. I didn’t expect to find two mentions of relatively obscure novels I wrote about in my DPhil – Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew and David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo – but they are among the miscellany of titles Collins is reminded of. You get the sense that living in Hay allows you to live in this tapestry of literature past and present – even if most of the booksellers are interlopers, and most of the locals have more down-to-earth jobs. As Collins puts it, the locals are book movers and the foreigners are booksellers.

They start house hunting. The title of the book rather gives away which house they’ll ultimately decide is their ideal home, flooded basement and all, so the reader isn’t super surprised when various other viewings end up in disappointment. But surprise isn’t the point of Sixpence House; it’s about watching a book lover discover his ideal homeland – and then discover that not all that glisters is gold. Not that there’s a dark underbelly to Hay – simply that life doesn’t always work out quite the way one hopes, particularly if you are trying to bring together many disparate threads.

One of those threads is leaving America. Collins has a British passport, but he is American through and through – and this book is clearly aimed at Americans. Occasionally that made it a bit off-putting to read for this Englishman. I don’t need to be introduced to things from my culture like Countdown with the breathless incredulity Collins relays them. I don’t need to be told that our roads are too narrow, our bedrooms too small, and our teeth too bad. (Though I do always welcome an American marvelling at the wonders of the NHS!) On the flip side, he doesn’t explain American cultural references – what on earth is C-SPAN, for example? (I have Googled it now). On yet another flip side, he mentions Lord Archer in a way that assumes the reader knows everything about him – did that news really get across the Atlantic?

As a memoir, it naturally doesn’t have the central narrative-non-fiction of Collins’ excellent book about William Shakespeare that I read earlier in the year, and I suppose Sixpence House is almost entirely a memoir that also looks a little at the life and recent history of a place. It’s nice to learn more about Richard Booth, particularly after his recent death, and there is an engaging ongoing thread of Collins editing his first book about notable losers, but there is a slight caginess – cageyness? – to the storytelling that makes you wonder if Collins felt entirely comfortable about writing a memoir. And it’s also unclear exactly why they decide to leave, in the end, while in the midst of looking to buy houses. He can draw the parameters wherever he wants, naturally, but I was left with quite a few questions.

Despite that, this is a really enjoyable book. As I say, I think it’s primarily targeted at Americans – but it is also special to those of us who know and love Hay. So if you’re an American who loves Hay but has also not picked up too many details about life in the UK, then you might just be the ideal reader for Sixpence House!