The Diary of a Bookseller Page 3
Till total £13
2 customers
FRIDAY, 14 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
If anyone can be said to be a Wigtown institution, it is Vincent. He has been here as long as anyone can remember, although he spent his childhood on the Clyde. He is universally liked, and is interesting and mischievous. There is a rumour that he was educated at Cambridge, but as far as I am aware, nobody has been able to substantiate this. He must be in his eighties, but he still works long hours – longer than any of his mechanics. Vincent’s garage was once a Renault dealership, from which he sold new cars. Indeed, the old showroom is still there, with all the faded and cracked Renault branding on it, but now, instead of shiny new cars, his fleet consists of vehicles that, to put it politely, have seen better days. Once, when a botanist friend was visiting, we went there to fill the van with diesel. My friend leapt excitedly out of the van and headed towards one of Vincent’s fleet, which had been parked outside the showroom with four flat tyres since I have been back in Wigtown. He pointed at a fern that was growing inside the wheel arch and identified it as something quite rare.
After lunch I drove to a farm near Stranraer to give a probate valuation on some books. I was met by a damp, taciturn farmer in a tweed cap who instructed me to follow him on his quad bike, complete with a miserable collie perched precariously on the back, barking at the van all the way. We soon arrived at a desolate-looking farmhouse in the hollow of a muddy hillside, made all the more awful by the incessant, horizontal rain.
Inside, he explained that the house had belonged to his uncle and aunt. She had died five years previously and the uncle two years ago. It was clear that nothing had been touched since then, or in fact probably in the five years since his aunt had died. A lonely-looking cat lay on a blanket on a radiator by the window and stared out across the flooded fields. The farmer went up every day to empty the litter tray and feed it. Everything was covered in dust and cat hair. There were about two thousand books, crammed into every nook and cranny, including a pile on every step of the stairs. The aunt was the reader. L. M. Montgomery, Star Trek, Agatha Christie, Folio Society and a lot of children’s books, including many complete runs. Most were paperbacks and not in particularly good condition, thanks in part to the cat. I valued the lot at £300, and he asked if I would consider buying them once he had discussed it with his family. I told him that I would, but that a lot of it was rubbish. He replied that if he decided to sell them to me, it would be conditional on the entire lot being taken away.
When I returned to the shop at 3 p.m., I was immediately accosted by a customer who marched up to the counter without the slightest of pleasantries and barked, ‘Gold markings.’ I sighed inside and explained where the jewellery section was.
Till total £307.50
4 customers
SATURDAY, 15 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 6
Books found: 6
Yet another miserable day, which did not improve at 9.10 a.m., when the telephone rang: ‘It’s a bloody disgrace. I don’t know how you have the nerve to call yourself a bookseller, sending out this sort of rubbish’, etc. He continued in this vein for several minutes. On further questioning, it transpired that he had ordered a book from a shop with a similar name (not unusual, as Tom Jones so wisely said), and he was not happy with the condition it was in. When it became clear that he’d telephoned the wrong bookshop and that the whole affair was nothing to do with us, he told me that he would be ‘taking the matter further’, then hung up.
A woman wearing what appeared to be a sleeping bag with a hole cut in the top for her head and the bottom for her feet complained about the icy temperature in the shop. The shop is old, cold and rambling. It is a large, granite-fronted building on the broad main street of Wigtown. In the early nineteenth century it was the home of a man called George McHaffie. He was the town’s provost, and he rebuilt the property in the Georgian style, which it retains to this day. The entire ground floor is now devoted to books, and at the last count there were about 100,000 of them. In the past fifteen years we have replaced every shelf and done considerable work, both structural and cosmetic. Customers often refer to it as ‘an Aladdin’s cave’ or ‘a ‘labyrinth’. I removed the internal doors in the shop to encourage customers to explore more, but this, and the fact that it is a huge, old house with inadequate heating, often lead to unflattering comments about the temperature from customers.
Till total £336.01
8 customers
MONDAY, 17 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 9
Books found: 8
More torrential rain. An elderly customer complimented the window display, mistaking the pots, pans and mugs (which are there to catch the drips from the leak) for a cookery-themed display.
I haven’t seen the cat since Saturday. Anna thinks he is being bullied by a rival cat that is coming in during the night and stealing his food. Admittedly, he does seem to be going through a lot of food and there is a smell of cat piss about the place, and Captain never does that in the house.
This morning, as I was going through boxes from our old warehouse, I found a book signed by Sir Walter Scott. It came from a book collection that I’d bought from a castle in Ayrshire. I had boxed the books and forgotten all about them for a few months. It’s always a thrilling moment to know that you’re handling a book that someone whose literary genius has endured for over two hundred years once held in their hands. The best market for this sort of thing is not the shop, and they usually end up on eBay or being sent to Lyon & Turnbull, a saleroom in Edinburgh that usually realises good prices for the lots I consign. I’ll try this on eBay with a reserve of £200, and if it fails to sell, then it can go to L&T.
Our warehouse is a building in the garden that was shelved out for books and had a small office with a loo. It still serves as a warehouse, but we now use it to store boxes of books for which there’s no space in the shop. We built it (in 2006) to expand our online stock and sales. That side of the business had one full-time employee, initially Norrie, then a friend from the nearby village of Bladnoch, whose days were occupied with listing fresh stock and dealing with orders and inquiries. For a while it seemed to make a bit of money, but as more competition crept into the online marketplace, prices came down, and by 2012 it was obvious that it wasn’t even making enough money to cover wages, so with considerable reluctance I had to make the only remaining full-time member of staff redundant and ship the stock to a friend in Grimsby who had a more efficient operation. Before doing that, though, I trawled through it for material I thought might improve the quality of the stock in the shop, boxed this up and moved it over to the shop. This Sir Walter Scott inscription was among those boxes of books. Nowadays everything we buy (with the exception of FBA stock) ends up in the shop, and if a book is worth listing online, either Nicky or I will list it. The only drawback with this system is that customers are inclined to move books, and occasionally we are unable to find them and fulfil orders.
Although Scott was well known when he inscribed this book (to Mary Stewart), it was six years before Waverley was published and his name became a household one. Dedications and presentation copies also throw up the question of the identity of the person to whom the book was inscribed: perhaps Stuart Kelly, a good friend and author of Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation, might have an idea.
At 11 a.m. the telephone rang. It was a Welsh woman who calls every few months. She has the most depressed voice I have ever heard and always asks for eighteenth-century theology. When I read her the list of titles we have in stock, she invariably responds, ‘Oh, that’s very, very disappointing.’ She has been calling for several years now, and while initially I would read titles to her and try to see if we had anything in stock that she might want, after years of consistently being on the receiving end of her disappointment, I have given up and just invent titles now.
The farmer from Stranraer called back and offered the b
ook collection on the condition that we take the whole lot. This is a difficult decision as there is a considerable amount of worthless material, the house is in a revolting state and a lot of the books are in very inaccessible places. Not only does that take more time to clear, but my back is creaking and weak. Twisting awkwardly into tiny corners is becoming increasingly problematic, but I told him that I’d take them and agreed to collect them next Tuesday.
Till total £282.90
21 customers
TUESDAY, 18 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 5
Books found: 3
One of today’s online orders was about a nature reserve in Zimbabwe called Wankie.
This morning I received a message from Amazon informing me that our online performance had dropped from Good to Fair and that if it doesn’t improve they’ll suspend my account. One of the principal pleasures of self-employment is that you don’t have to do what the boss tells you. As Amazon marches on with its ‘everything shop’ crusade, it is slowly but certainly becoming the boss of the self-employed in retail. I’ll have to recruit more members to the Random Book Club so that I can break free from the increasingly constraining shackles of Amazon. Performance ratings are based on several factors, including order defect rate, cancellation rate, late dispatch rate, policy violations and contact response time. These are not the easiest of metrics to follow, so I tend to ignore it until they email me to tell me that I am in trouble.
A family of four came in at 12.30 p.m. Each of them bought a book; each gave a different response to the question ‘Would you like a bag?’
Mother – ‘Oh, go on then.’
Father – ‘No.’
Son 1 – ‘Yes.’
Son 2 – ‘Only if you’ve got one.’
At 1 p.m. Carol Crawford appeared. I like to stock a few new books, probably around 150 titles that we buy from Booksource, a distributor of predominantly Scottish books. Carol is one of their sales reps. She is a charming woman, and we always chat about a variety of things before tackling the book business. Her son, who was just a small boy when she first started to come to the shop, is now at university. Until last year she would come armed with briefcases containing folders of book covers in plastic sheets, and order forms. Now she just has an iPad. She comes about four times a year, and deciding what to buy is a tricky business, particularly since customers no longer see the cover price of a new book as what they should be expected to pay. Amazon and Waterstones put paid to that, so once again I am in the position that – should I decide to – I could probably buy the stock I buy from Booksource cheaper on Amazon than I can from the distributor. I ordered two or three copies of about forty new titles on her list, mainly of local relevance, or written by people I know.
Back in 1899 the most powerful UK publishing houses agreed that they would only supply bookshops on the condition that the books were sold at the cover price and not discounted. Any breach of this, they agreed, would result in all of them ceasing to supply any books to the culprit. This was known as the Net Book Agreement (NBA). The system worked well for everyone until 1991, when chain stores Dillons and Waterstones emerged, dwarfing the small independents. They quickly realised that they could circumvent the NBA under a clause that exempted damaged books. Using a marker pen, they scored a cross onto the edges of the books they wished to discount. Occasionally I will still come across one of these when I am buying. Bitter fighting between the publishers and the big chains ensued, culminating in a ruling by the Office of Fair Trading that declared the NBA illegal in 1997.
One of the benefits of the NBA was that the financial stability of the market it created allowed publishers to publish books that perhaps had more cultural but probably less financial value. Without it, publishers are no longer in a position to take such risks, and consequently, although the number of books printed in the UK each year has increased, the number of titles has diminished: more copies of fewer books. The book market is now controlled not by publishers but by the buyers for Waterstones and Tesco and other ‘combines’, as Orwell would have called them.
Smell of cat piss is getting stronger.
Till total £111.50
12 customers
WEDNESDAY, 19 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 8
Books found: 5
Finally, a day without rain. Most of the day was spent packing the books for the Random Book Club and dealing with the Royal Mail’s neolithic mailing system. As the post office in Wigtown is closed on Wednesday afternoon I’ll have to go and see Wilma tomorrow morning and ask her if she can send the postman over in the afternoon to pick up the six sacks of parcels.
This morning I listed the book signed by Sir Walter Scott on eBay. There’s little point in listing it on Amazon or AbeBooks. Although AbeBooks has a ‘Signed Books’ section, this is not a copy of one of Scott’s own titles, so it would never be found on a search.
Four elderly ladies came in at 10.30 a.m. I was working at the computer with my back to them but could hear them speculating about where the craft books might be. After some discussion, one of them spotted me in the corner and said to the others, ‘Why don’t we just ask the lady?’
Norrie thinks he knows where the water is getting in and flooding the window display, and has offered to fix it.
I have reached the part in Any Human Heart where Logan’s son decides to name his band Dead Souls and Logan responds with laughter, telling him that Nikolai Gogol wrote a book of the same name. I had no idea, and felt as stupid as Logan’s son. It will be the next book I read.
Till total £24
4 customers
THURSDAY, 20 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 6
Books found: 6
Nicky strolled in at 9.15 a.m. (fifteen minutes late), looked at the clock and said, ‘Oh, is that the time?’ before throwing her bag, hat and coat on the floor in the middle of the shop and going upstairs to use the loo and make herself a cup of tea.
Till total £88
7 customers
FRIDAY, 21 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
Today’s online orders include one of the most boring titles I have seen for a while: British Transport Film Library Catalogue since 1966. It includes such riveting films as ‘AC electric locomotive drivers’ procedures’, ‘Service for Southend’ and ‘Snowdrift at Bleath Gill’. Despite the popular perception that books about trains are extremely dull (the reputation of trainspotters as banana-sandwich-eating, anorak-wearing bores is probably in part responsible for this), they are among the best-selling books in the shop. Invariably it is men who buy them, and more often than not they sport beards. They are generally among the most good-natured of the shop’s customers, possibly because they’re delighted when they see the size of the railway section, which normally comprises about two thousand books.
A customer wearing yellow Crocs asked where the parking meters were in Wigtown. When I explained that there were none and that there are no parking restrictions, she looked completely flabbergasted and commented, ‘My God, this is wonderful. It’s like this place is trapped in a time warp of fifty years ago.’
I locked the cat flap last night when Captain came in. No smell of cat piss this morning. Anna may well be correct about the unwelcome visiting cat.
Till total £24.50
1 customer
SATURDAY, 22 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
The first telephone call of the day was from Mrs Phillips, near Dumfries: ‘I am ninety-three years old and blind, you know.’
I went to value her books about two years ago – interesting collection in a very nice house. When I arrived, I discovered that she’d cooked lunch for me and her grandson, who was visiting. I had already eaten – a dry sandwich with an unidentifiable filling bought from the petrol station in Newton Stewart – but didn’t want to decline since she’d gone to the trouble. It was prawns in aspic. Today she was calling to order a book,
Babar, for her great-granddaughter. She’s one of the few customers who still order books through the shop, rather than directly online from Amazon.
One of the shop’s Facebook followers came in to buy books today. She and her boyfriend want to move here and I overheard her whispering ‘Don’t say anything stupid or he’ll post it on Facebook.’ I will write something mean about her later. When I set up the Facebook account for the shop four years ago, I had a look at other bookshops that had done the same. The content seemed almost universally bland and didn’t really convey the full horror or the exquisite joy of working in a bookshop, so I took a calculated risk and decided to focus on customer behaviour, particularly the stupid questions and the rude comments. It appears to have paid off, and those who follow the shop seem to become more delighted the more offensive I am about customers. I recently checked to see who is following me, and a significant number of bookshops are on the list.
Till total £227.45
14 customers
MONDAY, 24 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
It was a depressingly wet day when I awoke, but by 9.30 a.m. the sun was blazing. The Polish builders arrived to remove the leylandii hedge and replace it with a new stone wall. After they had cut down the hedge they decided to set fire to it, blanketing most of the town in thick, acrid smoke. For much of the day I could see people staggering past the door of the shop, coughing and swearing.