The Diary of a Bookseller Read online

  As he was leaving, Norrie and Nicky had a heated discussion about something that I caught the tail end of. It appeared to be about evolution. This is a favourite topic of Nicky’s, and it’s not uncommon to find copies of On the Origin of Species in the fiction section, put there by her. I retaliate by putting copies of the Bible (which she considers history) in among the novels.

  Found a book called Gay Agony, by the unlikely-sounding author H. A. Manhood, as I was going through the theology books brought in by the retired minister. Apparently Manhood lived in a converted railway carriage in Sussex.

  Till total £67

  4 customers

  SATURDAY, 8 FEBRUARY

  Online orders: 4

  Books found: 4

  Today Nicky covered the shop so that I could travel to Leeds to look at a private library of 600 books on aviation. Anna and I left the shop at 10 a.m., and as we were leaving, Nicky advised, ‘Look at the books, think of a figure, then halve it.’ She also told me that when the apocalypse comes and only the Jehovah’s Witnesses are left on earth (or whatever her version of the apocalypse is – I do not pay much attention when she starts on religion), she intends to come round to my house and take my stuff. She keeps eyeing up various pieces of my furniture with this clearly in mind.

  Anna is my partner, and is an American writer twelve years my junior. We share the four-bedroom flat above the shop with a black cat called Captain, named after the blind sea captain in Under Milk Wood. Anna worked for NASA in Los Angeles and came to Wigtown for a working holiday in 2008 to fulfil an ambition to work in a bookshop in Scotland, near the sea. There was an immediate attraction between us, and following a brief return to California, she decided to come back. In 2012 her story piqued the interest of Anna Pasternak, a journalist who was visiting Wigtown during the book festival that year, and she wrote a piece for the Daily Mail about it. Soon afterwards Anna was approached by a publisher who wanted her to write a memoir, and in 2013 her first book, Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets, was duly published by Short Books. Despite her literary success, she is a self-confessed ‘linguistic impressionist’, with a tendency to re-invent language when she speaks that is both endearing and frustrating. Her method of interpreting the words she hears through half-closed ears and repeating them in a version that bears some proximity to the original, but with blurred lines, results in an occasionally incomprehensible stew of words, seasoned with a handful of Yiddish words that she picked up from her grandmother.

  The woman selling the aviation books had telephoned last week with a degree of urgency. They had belonged to her late husband, who died a year ago. She has sold the house and is moving out in March. We arrived at her house at 3 p.m. I was instantly distracted by her obvious wig, not to mention horse chestnuts scattered on the floor near the doors and windows. She explained that her husband had died from cancer and that she was now undergoing treatment for the same thing. The books were in a converted loft at the top of a narrow staircase. It took some time to negotiate a price, but we finally agreed on £750 for about 300 books. She was quite happy for me to leave the remainder behind. If only this was always the case. More often than not people want to dispose of the entire collection, particularly when it is a deceased estate. Anna and I loaded fourteen boxes into the van and left for home. The woman seemed relieved to have managed to say goodbye to what was clearly her husband’s passion, which she obviously knew she was going to find difficult to part with, despite having no interest in the subject herself. As we were leaving, Anna asked the woman about all the chestnuts around the doors and windows. It transpired that she and Anna both have a fear of spiders, and apparently horse chestnuts release a chemical that repels them.

  I bought the van (a red Renault Trafic) two years ago and have almost run it into the ground. Even on the shortest of journeys I am met with enthusiastic waves from people in the oncoming traffic who have clearly mistaken me for their postman.

  This aviation collection contained twenty-two Putnam Aeronautical Histories. This is a series about aircraft manufacturers, or even types of aircraft – Fokker, Hawker, Supermarine, Rocket Aircraft, and in the past they have consistently sold well both online and in the shop for between £20 and £40 per volume. So I based my price on the assumption that I could sell the Putnams fairly quickly and recover my costs.

  Many book deals begin with a complete stranger calling and explaining that someone close to them has recently died, and that they have been charged with the job of disposing of their books. Understandably, they are often still grieving, and it is almost impossible not to be sucked into their grief, even in the smallest of ways. Going through the books of the person who has died affords an insight into who that person was, their interests and, to a degree, their personality. Now, even when I visit friends, I am drawn to bookcases wherever I see them, and particularly to any incongruity on the shelves which might reveal something I didn’t know about them. My own bookcase is as guilty of this as any – among the modern fiction and books about Scottish art and history that populate the shelves can be found a copy of Talk Dirty Yiddish, and Collectable Spoons of the Third Reich – the former a gift from Anna, and the latter from my friend Mike.

  Anna and I drove back from Leeds over Ilkley Moor through the driving winter rain, and returned home at about 7 p.m. I unlocked the door to find piles of books on the floor, boxes everywhere and dozens of emails awaiting me. Nicky appears to gain some sort of sadistic gratification from leaving mountains of books and boxes all over the shop, probably because she knows how fastidious I am about keeping surfaces clear, particularly the floor. Perhaps because she is by nature an untidy person, she is convinced that my desire for order and organisation is highly unusual and entertaining, so she deliberately creates chaos in the shop then accuses me of having OCD when I berate her for it.

  Till total £77.50

  7 customers

  MONDAY, 10 FEBRUARY

  Online orders: 8

  Books found: 7

  Among the orders was one for the Pebble Mill Good Meat Guide.

  Because we put through a reasonable volume of mail we have a contract with Royal Mail, and rather than take the parcels to the counter in the post office for Wilma, the postmaster, to deal with, we process them online, and every day either Nicky or I will take the sack of franked packages over to the post office’s back room, where they are picked up and taken to the sorting office.

  The post office in Wigtown, like so many rural post offices, is part of another shop, and ours is a newsagent/toyshop owned by a Northern Irishman called William. Whatever the opposite of a sunny disposition is, William has it. In spades. He never smiles, and complains about absolutely everything. If he is in the shop when I drop the mail bags off, I always make a point of saying good morning to him. On the rare occasions that he bothers to make any sort of response, it is inevitably a muttered ‘What’s good about it?’ or ‘It might be a good morning if I wasn’t stuck in this awful place.’ Generally, the breezier the greeting you salute him with, the more hostile his response will be. As a measure of the depth of his personal well of human misery, he tapes all the magazines in the display stand with three pieces of sellotape so that it is impossible for customers to flick through them. Wilma, in marked contrast, is witty, bright and friendly. The post office is really the hub of Wigtown’s community – everyone goes there at some point during the week, and it is where gossip is exchanged and funeral notices are posted.

  After lunch the till roll ran out, so I went to look for more and it appears that we have completely run out, so I ordered another twenty rolls, which should see the machine through for two or three years. Hopefully fewer, if business picks up.

  Two new subscribers to the Random Book Club today. The Random Book Club is an offshoot of the shop which I set up a few years ago when business was sore and the future looked bleak. For £59 a year subscribers receive a book a month, but they have no say over what genre of book they receive, and quality control is enti
rely down to me. I am extremely judicious in what I choose to put in the box from which the RBC books are parcelled and sent. Since subscribers are clearly inveterate readers, I always take care to pick books that I think anyone who loves reading for its own sake would enjoy. There is nothing that would require too much technical expertise to understand: a mix of fiction and non-fiction, with the weight slightly towards non-fiction, and some poetry. Among the books going out later this month are a copy of Clive James’s Other Passports, Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, Iris Murdoch’s biography of Sartre, Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice, and a book called 100+ Principles of Genetics. All the books are in good condition, none is ex-library, and some – several of them each year – are hundreds of years old. I estimate that if the members decided to sell the books on eBay, they would more than make their money back. There is a forum on the web site, but nobody uses it, which gives me an insight into the type of person who is attracted to the idea – they don’t like clubs where they have to interact with other people. Perhaps that is why I came up with the idea in the first place – it is a sort of Groucho Marx approach to clubs. There are about 150 members and, apart from a minimal amount of advertising in the Literary Review, the only marketing I do is to have a web site and Facebook page, neither of which I have updated for some time. Word of mouth seems to have been the best way of marketing it. It has saved me from financial embarrassment during a very difficult time in the book trade.

  Till total £119.99

  11 customers

  TUESDAY, 11 FEBRUARY

  Online orders: 7

  Books found: 5

  Norrie covered the shop so that I could go to the auction in Dumfries, about fifty miles away. This is a general sale, and it is impossible to predict what you’re going to find; the saleroom has everything from chaises-longues to washing machines, chandeliers, rugs, china, jewellery and sometimes even cars. Initially I began going to buy books, but quickly realised that the cheapest way to furnish the flat above the shop (which was empty when I bought it) was to buy furniture from the sale, so when I had full-time staff in the shop I would religiously drive there every second Tuesday and pick up bargains: pieces of antique furniture far more beautiful and infinitely cheaper than their modern equivalents from IKEA. Very occasionally I will come home with a box of books, but far more likely a Georgian bureau, a stuffed squirrel, a standard lamp or a leather armchair. Among the regulars is a charming retired submariner called Angus. He and I tend to huddle together and discuss the other buyers at the sale. He has nicknames for all of the regulars – Dave the Hat, The Bishop and others – none of them cruel, but all perfectly fitting. Today I returned with a pair of wooden Lillywhites skis, which will be used for a window display, then sold in the shop. Nowadays, because I can no longer afford full-time staff, I rarely have the opportunity to attend the auction.

  When Anna is around, we always try to make the effort to go to the auction, and I will find cover for the shop. She adores it but has a £3 maximum bid, which means she always returns with a lot of rubbish, and today was no exception – a job lot that included a brass corgi, five thimbles, an old set of keys and a broken toast rack. On one occasion though, she stretched to £15 for a box of costume jewellery in which she found a ring that she thought looked interesting. She took it to a Bonhams’ free valuation day; they suggested that she consign it to a sale. It made £850.

  For a few years I have given over the formal drawing room above the shop to an art class for one afternoon a week. It is taught by local artist Davy Brown and takes place every Tuesday. A dozen or so retired ladies make up the group. At this time of year the house is bitterly cold, so I left Norrie instructions to light the fire and put the space heater on for an hour before they were due to arrive, but he forgot. One of them almost needed to be resuscitated. I would happily let them use the space for free, but they kindly pay me enough to cover the heating costs and a bit more beside.

  When Anna and I returned to the shop after the auction, I noticed that the left-hand window display was completely flooded (there is a large window on each side of the door to the shop which we use for themed displays). It has always been a bit leaky, but nothing like as bad as this. I removed all the soaked books and disposed of them. Now, in their place, the window display consists of six mugs, a towel and a saucepan catching the drips. Every year there is something in the house or the shop that demands the attention of a builder, and invariably it comes in the winter, when the weather is battering relentlessly and the coffers are at their emptiest. I try to budget on about £7,000 a year for keeping the roof over my head and the walls standing, and so far this has been pretty much what it has cost.

  Eliot – Wigtown Book Festival director – arrived at 7 p.m. In the last weekend of September, and through to the first weekend in October, Wigtown plays host to a literary festival. In the time I have been running the shop this has grown from a handful of events with tiny audiences largely made up of locals to a huge affair with 300-seat marquees and over 200 events, which include cultural luminaries from all quarters. It is an extraordinary festival, and now – from its humble beginnings with a few volunteers running it – it has an office with five paid staff and an audience of several thousand, drawn from all over the world. Eliot was a journalist, and an extremely good one. He moved to Wigtown a few years ago, and it became quickly apparent that he was ideally suited to run the festival, so money was found to pay him and a salaried position created. He has become a good friend, and I am godfather to his second child. Now, sadly, he lives in London and I see less of him than I would wish, but when he attends Festival Company board meetings in Wigtown, he stays with me. As always, shortly after his arrival he removed his shoes and threw them on the floor. Within ten minutes I had tripped over them.

  Till total £5

  1 customer

  WEDNESDAY, 12 FEBRUARY

  Online orders: 15

  Books found: 14

  Cold, dark and miserable day today; driving rain all day. Eliot was in the bath between 8.15 a.m. and 9 a.m., so I missed the opportunity to brush my teeth or wash prior to opening the shop.

  In contrast to the weather, Nicky was irksomely bright and cheery all day. We discussed listing books for Fulfilled By Amazon, a service offered by Amazon whereby we list and label books on our database then send them up to their Dunfermline warehouse, where they are stored until ordered by a customer. Amazon’s staff will then pick and pack the titles as the orders come in. It solves the problem of lack of space in the shop and is particularly useful when a collection on a subject that might not be a good seller in the shop comes in. Nicky steadfastly refuses to list on FBA, based on a series of questionable judgements that stray into areas of morality and other irrelevant fields of philosophy. I do not fully understand, or even partly understand, why Nicky objects so strongly to FBA, other than that it is a transaction involving Amazon, through whom we already sell some of our shop stock. Very few booksellers think anything positive about Amazon, but it is, sadly, the only shop in town when it comes to online selling. I’ve given up on trying to reason with her: she nods helpfully at my suggestions and requests, then ploughs on doing exactly as she did before with no regard whatsoever to anything I’ve said.

  We spent part of the morning setting up a Winter Olympics window display in the non-leaking window using the pair of 1920s Lillywhites wooden skis that I bought at the auction yesterday. The other window is still full of pans and mugs collecting water from the leaks.

  At lunchtime Anna and I drove to Newton Stewart, from where she caught the bus to Dumfries, then the train back to London.

  At 2 p.m. a man with a Mugabe-style moustache brought in two boxes of books on art and the cinema. He had his eye on a few books in the shop, so we agreed on £30 credit for the books he brought in. This is an almost daily occurrence and is one of the ways we acquire stock, other than house clearances. Most days at least one person will come in to sell books, and about 100 books a day come into the
shop this way. Normally, we reject about 70 per cent of them, but more often than not the person bringing them in will want to leave the entire lot. This creates a problem with the shop filling up with boxes of books that we don’t want. Usually we pay cash for books brought into the shop, as the quantities do not require recourse to the chequebook. For these transactions we have a handsome Victorian ledger in which the seller has to enter their name, address and the amount, so that we can keep the books balanced.

  Once, not long after I had bought the shop, a young man who was emigrating to Canada brought in several boxes of books to sell. When I asked him to sign the cashbook, he wrote ‘Tom Jones’. I laughed and pointed out a few other names that were clearly made up but that he was the first to use Tom Jones, to which he replied ‘It’s not unusual’ and left. When I started to price up his books, I noticed that there, on the endpaper of every book, written in biro, was the name Tom Jones. His taste in books was very similar to mine, although there were a few that I hadn’t yet read. Assuming that I would like those too, I fished out half a dozen and put them aside to read later. One of them was The Ascent of Rum Doodle, W. E. Bowman’s classic spoof of climbing literature.

  Till total £104.90

  8 customers

  THURSDAY, 13 FEBRUARY

  Online orders: 4

  Books found: 4

  Eliot left for London at 2 p.m.

  A young woman and her mother spent most of the afternoon in the shop. The mother seemed well prepared for the temperature, but the daughter appeared to be oblivious to the near-freezing conditions. She chatted breezily away as she was paying, and told me that her name was Lauren McQuistin, and she was training to be an opera singer. She seemed vaguely familiar; must have been in before. She bought an impressive pile of fairly highbrow material and suggested that I read Any Human Heart. Possibly the most recommended book I have been advised to read is William Boyd’s Any Human Heart. I tend to avoid anything that is recommended to me, preferring naively to imagine that I will dig my own literary goldmine, but so compelling was her enthusiasm that after supper I lit the wood-burning stove and began to read it. By bedtime I was completely hooked.