Though Wales is visited mainly for its beautiful scenery, ancient castles and charming sea-side resorts, the fourth most popular place, attracting over a million visitors a year, is a little town on the River Wye, rightly called Hay-on-Wye. The great number of book shops has earned the otherwise sleepy little border town the name of "largest second-hand book shop in the world," for the whole town seems to be one massive collection of books.
The whole thing began in the early 60’s when Richard Booth opened an antique (古董) store in which he also sold some books. The books sold far better than the antiques and soon the clever businessman was buying up every piece of property (地产) he could get in town to store and sell books. It wasn’t long before Mr. Booth began to call himself as "the world’s biggest second-hand book seller." He began to attract attention from book lovers.
The first success of Booth’s books brought other book traders to town. When a fire destroyed much of the castle in the early 1980’s Booth was forced to sell many of his properties. But other booksellers were only too anxious to move into town. People know it’s the place to find any book you wanted, but couldn’t find elsewhere.
A lot of antique shops and restaurants have sprung up in the shadow of the second-hand bookshops. This has led declining (日益衰落) towns in other parts of Britain and abroad to seek Booth’s assistance. So far, 30 towns in Europe and another 30 in the US have taken advantage of his ideas. Hay-on-Wye, meanwhile, receives little or no input from the Wales Tourist Board and runs its own tourist information center. To ease the feelings of people on both sides of the border, it considers itself neither in Wales nor England, but lying comfortably between the two. However, the town is certainly in Wales.
What does "sprung up" mean