The Guardian reports that the remarkably bookish town has beaten off 52 other British towns and villages, including York and Glastonbury, to twin with the ancient city in Mali, on the edge of the Sahara desert. “We lie on exactly the same line of longitude, it was meant to be,” said Gareth Ratcliffe, mayor of Hay of its new sister town 2,450 miles away.
Timbuktu, founded as a caravan trading post at least 1,000 years ago, is a place of such legend that in a recent survey one third of Britons refused to believe it actually exists – a view possibly shared by anyone who has tried to get to the Welsh town by public transport. But various similarities between the two cities are evident, according to Anne Brichto, a Hay bookseller and head of the town’s twinning committee, who said: “Timbuktu is the oldest home of the written word in Africa; it has a large number of private and public libraries housing ancient Arabic and African manuscripts … Hay-on-Wye is the secondhand book capital of the world.”