Imagine walking through a small Welsh town and finding an entire wall covered with books.

No shop window.

No carefully designed display.

Not even a door to walk through.

Just hundreds of books, standing outside beneath a simple wooden shelter, waiting for someone to stop and browse.

Welcome to Hay-on-Wye.

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📚 A Town Where Books Belong Everywhere

I knew before arriving that Hay-on-Wye was famous for books.

What I wasn't expecting was just how naturally books seemed to be part of the town itself.

They aren't confined to conventional bookshops.

They appear in windows, courtyards, narrow passages and, as in this photograph, directly beside the street.

That was probably one of the details I enjoyed most about walking around Hay-on-Wye.

The town doesn't simply sell books.

It seems to live among them.

And this outdoor bookshelf was perhaps the perfect example.

Rows and rows of used books fill almost every available centimetre. Some stand neatly upright, others lean against their neighbours, while several have simply surrendered to gravity and formed small horizontal piles.

There is something wonderfully imperfect about it.

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📖 The Pleasure of Not Knowing What You Will Find

Online shopping has made finding a particular book incredibly easy.

Type the title.

Click.

Done.

Places like this offer exactly the opposite experience.

You don't necessarily arrive looking for anything.

You browse.

You pull out an unfamiliar title.

You put it back.

Another cover catches your attention.

Five minutes become twenty.

And perhaps you leave carrying a book you had never heard of before arriving.

That element of discovery feels increasingly rare.

Maybe that's why places like Hay-on-Wye remain so appealing.

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🏘️ Hay-on-Wye — The Town of Books

Sitting close to the border between Wales and England, Hay-on-Wye has built an extraordinary international reputation around the written word.

For a relatively small town, the number of bookshops is remarkable.

Second-hand books, rare editions, specialist collections, old maps, poetry, history, travel, fiction...

There seems to be a shelf somewhere for almost everything.

The town is also internationally associated with the Hay Festival, which brings writers, readers and ideas together every year.

But away from the festival, the relationship between Hay and books remains visible everywhere.

You only need to walk through its streets.

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📷 Why I Took This Photograph

Visually, I loved the apparent disorder.

Hundreds of different colours and book spines create an enormous mosaic beneath the dark roof, while the old stone and white façades behind them immediately place the scene within the character of the town.

I decided to photograph the shelves straight on.

No dramatic angle was necessary.

The books were the composition.

Looking at the photograph now, I still find myself trying to read some of the titles.

And that might be the best indication that the image worked.

It makes me want to walk back to those shelves and start searching again.

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📷 Photo Notes

Series: Wales Through My Lens
Location: Hay-on-Wye, Wales
Genre: Travel & Street Photography
Subject: Outdoor second-hand book shelves
Composition: Frontal perspective • Repetition • Colour • Visual texture
Mood: Curious • Unexpected • Inviting

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"In Hay-on-Wye, you don't always have to enter a bookshop. Sometimes the bookshop comes out to meet you."