The Diary of a Bookseller Read online

  Till total £277

  16 customers

  TUESDAY, 25 FEBRUARY

  Online orders: 4

  Books found: 4

  Sandy, the most tattooed man in Scotland, brought in some walking sticks he’d made. We have an arrangement whereby he gets £6 credit in the shop for each one he brings me. I then sell the sticks for £10 each. They sell well – probably one or two a week – and he adds a label with the name of the wood and some local lore about it. His taste in reading is mainly for Scottish folklore and ancient history. He is a pagan and lives near Stranraer, but comes over once every couple of weeks with a friend and makes a day out of his trip to Wigtown, going for lunch or coffee and browsing in the shops. He is incredibly affable, always good-natured and invariably has something interesting to say. Best of all, he loves winding up Nicky.

  At noon I made a sandwich, and Anna and I headed off in the van with fifty or so cardboard boxes to the old farmhouse near Stranraer. The grizzled farmer in his damp tweed cap met us again and took us back up to the house where the old couple had lived. It was even more filthy than I remembered. Anna and I started boxing the books and ferrying them to the van. The lonely cat gasped a cracked ‘meow’ every time we passed it, then resumed its wistful stare out across the flooded fields full of cattle with their backs to the driving rain.

  As is often the way with clearing books that have been in the same place for a long time, by the time we were finished we were comprehensively covered in dirt and cat hair – a facet of the genteel art of bookselling that people rarely imagine. I paid the farmer and creaked off down the potholed driveway, the van grinding slowly under the weight of the load.

  The experience of clearing a deceased estate is one familiar to most people in the second-hand book trade and it is one to which you slowly become desensitised, except in situations like this, in which the dead couple is childless. For some reason the photographs on the wall – the husband in his smart RAF uniform, the wife as a young woman visiting Paris – evoke a kind of melancholy that is not there in deals where couples are survived by their children. Dismantling such a book collection seems to be the ultimate act of destruction of their character – you are responsible for erasing the last piece of evidence of who they were. This woman’s book collection was a record of her character: her interests, as close as anything she left to some kind of genetic inheritance. Perhaps that’s why her nephew waited so long before asking us to look at the books, in the same way that people who lose a child often can’t bear to remove anything from their bedroom for years.

  Till total £124

  9 customers

  WEDNESDAY, 26 FEBRUARY

  Online orders: 4

  Books found: 4

  This morning a customer asked for books by Nigel Tranter, clearly confident that we wouldn’t have any. I directed him to the Scottish room, where we have most of Tranter’s work, including his architectural material, with a couple of exceptions. A few minutes later he scuttled out of the shop, trying not to be noticed. Some people just want you to know what their reading habits are and have no intention of buying anything.

  An incredibly haughty woman telephoned demanding the festival bed for the entire festival. The festival bed is a mezzanine bed that we built last year in the shop, partly as a homage to Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, partly as a publicity stunt and partly as an occasionally necessary extra bed. When I told her that it was unlikely that we were going to do it this year, she didn’t seem to want to understand and kept insisting that she needed it for the night of 29 September at the very least. It wasn’t long before the conversation took an ominous turn with the alarming words ‘I have an ulterior motive – I want to speak to you and Anna.’

  It transpired that she’s written an autobiography. It is called No, I Am Not Going on the Seesaw. The conversation was littered with references to the people she knows in publishing (‘I am not thinking about self-publishing, you know’), her insistence on finding her own proofreader (‘I have it on good authority that most proofreaders are incompetent’) and pregnant pauses to which she clearly attached weighty significance.

  She talked – again at considerable length – about how she felt she should be part of the programme for the 2015 festival. She will never, ever be part of the festival.

  Finished Any Human Heart. Absolutely adored it. Started reading Gogol’s Dead Souls. We had a copy in the Black Penguin Classics section.

  Till total £66

  7 customers

  THURSDAY, 27 FEBRUARY

  Online orders: 4

  Books found: 1

  On my sister’s advice, I checked TripAdvisor to see whether anyone had reviewed the shop. There were nine reviews, two of which made references to the quality of the food. We do not serve food. We have never served food. Two more complained that the shop ‘wasn’t as big’ as they had expected it to be.

  Inspired, I wrote a ridiculous review praising the owner’s magnificent good looks, convivial charm, captivatingly beautiful scent, the wonderful stock, the electric atmosphere and a litany of other unlikely superlatives. In no time at all it had been removed and TripAdvisor had sent a threatening email warning me not to do it again. I went straight back onto their site and wrote another one, and encouraged the shop’s Facebook followers to do the same.

  After lunch I checked eBay to find that the book signed by Sir Walter Scott sold for £250, so I emailed the winning bidder and sent them an invoice. It’s easy to miss things like important signatures or inscriptions in books when you’re buying, but equally so when you’re selling. Once, shortly after I bought the shop, I bought ten boxes of books unseen from another dealer, a man called David McNaughton, who had been in the trade for nearly forty years. He wanted £10 a box and assured me that it was reasonable stock. From previous dealings with him I had no reason to doubt this. What I didn’t expect, though, was to find a book signed by Florence Nightingale, dedicated to one of her nurses. It was a Charles Kingsley title – I forget which. Florence Nightingale was fond of inscribing books and giving them to her friends, and consequently there are quite a few of these about, but it still made £300 on eBay. A nurse in Missouri bought it. I sent David a case of wine and told him what had happened. Sadly, he died a few years ago. He was among the last of a generation of what can now be seen as traditional book dealers. Before the days of Amazon and AbeBooks – web sites to which one may quickly refer to check prices – booksellers would have to acquire and carry about all of that information, and David was a mine of biographical, bibliographical and literary information. Now this knowledge – accumulated over almost a lifetime, once so valued and from which a good living could be earned – is all but useless. Those dealers who could tell you the date, publisher, author and value of a book just by looking at it are few and far between, and their ranks are shrinking daily. I still know one or two of them, and they are among the people I admire most in the trade. Without exception, all of those I encountered and had dealings with – from what now feels like a bygone era of bookselling – were honest and decent.

  There was a stray cat in the Scottish room as I was closing up. It hissed and leapt through the cat flap as I chased it out.

  Till total £11

  3 customers

  FRIDAY, 28 FEBRUARY

  Online orders: 6

  Books found: 6

  Sara Maitland brought in three boxes of books to sell from her personal library. We discussed one of her best-known books, A Book of Silence, and the possibility of her doing an event at Hogmanay: possibly a silent walk followed by a talk on the importance of silence. Sara lives nearby, up in the hills behind New Luce, and is an occasional visitor to the shop. It’s always a pleasure to see her.

  This morning I went to Callum’s to collect thirty boxes I’d been storing in his garage. This largely consists of a collection of 500 books on golf which I have been trying to get rid of for over a year. Callum is a close friend; I’ve known him for about twelve years, and we often go hill
-walking, sailing and mountain-biking together. He lives in an old farmhouse near Kirkinner, about four miles from Wigtown, with his three sons, aged between ten and fifteen. He is from Northern Ireland, and is a couple of years older than I am. He has had an extraordinarily interesting range of jobs over his working life, from geological exploration in Venezuela to picking Scots pine cones in the Highlands, to being a financial adviser. Currently, he’s cutting and selling firewood, among other things. I suspect that one of the reasons we get along so well is that neither of us has ever seen ourselves as suited to having any kind of career, and although there are some things on which we disagree, there seem to be far more on which we are in agreement.

  The books in his garage were from a collection that I bought from a house in Manchester last year. I didn’t have space on the shelves to put it out, and the warehouse was full, so when Callum offered his garage as a temporary store, I gratefully accepted. Now he needs the space back, so I’ll have to find an alternative solution.

  Dumfries and Galloway Life magazine came for a photo shoot in the shop in the afternoon. I’m not sure what it was for, but they needed a lot of books as a backdrop. They took an hour and were gone by 4 p.m.

  Till total £51

  3 customers

  MARCH

  When I worked in a second-hand bookshop – so easily pictured, if you do not work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios – the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.

  George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’

  Really bookish people are a rarity, although there are vast numbers of those who consider themselves to be such. The latter are particularly easy to identify – often they will introduce themselves when they enter the shop as ‘book people’ and insist on telling you that ‘we love books’. They’ll wear T-shirts or carry bags with slogans explaining exactly how much they think they adore books, but the surest means of identifying them is that they never, ever buy books.

  These days it is so rare that I find the time to read that, when I do, it feels like the purest form of indulgence – more so than any other sensory experience. When an important relationship in my thirties came to an end, the only thing I could do was read, and I amassed a pile of books into which I sank and escaped from the world around me and inside me. The landscapes of Jonathan Meades, William Boyd, José Saramago, John Buchan, Alastair Reid, John Kennedy Toole and others protected me from my own thoughts, which were pushed into the background, where they could silently process without bothering me. I created a physical wall on my desk, made from the books, and as I read them the wall slowly came down until it was gone.

  In a more real sense, books are the commodity in which I trade, and the enormous numbers of them out there in the world excite a different part of my mind. When I go to a house to buy books, there is an anticipation unlike anything else. It is like casting a net and never knowing what you will find when you gather it in. I think that book dealers and antique dealers probably have the same sense of excitement when following up a call. As Gogol put it in Dead Souls: ‘Once, long ago, in the years of my youth, in the years of my childhood, which have flashed irretrievably by, it was a joy for me to drive for the very first time to a place unknown.’

  SATURDAY, 1 MARCH

  Online orders: 5

  Books found: 5

  Beautiful sunny day.

  Our Amazon Seller Rating has dropped to Poor.

  Kate, the postie, delivered the mail this morning at 10 a.m. as always. Among the usual bills and pleas from charities was a letter from Royal Mail informing me that – as part of an efficiency drive – they are increasing their rates. Apparently we’re all going to be saving money because their price increase is less than inflation. I did a few calculations and worked out that my average parcel will go from £1.69 to £1.87. This is a rise of 10 per cent. Last time I checked, inflation was about 2 per cent. Will Amazon increase the amount of postage they charge customers in line with the Royal Mail increase? Almost certainly not. At the moment, the £2.80 postal charge for a book bears no resemblance to the actual cost of posting individual books, so on some heavier books we lose money on postage, which is irritating, and on smaller books we make money on the postage, which irritates the customer. The only winner is Amazon, which takes 49p of the postage charged to the customer, leaving us with £2.31 postage per book.

  At lunchtime a customer asked if we ever lose books to thieves. It’s not something I’ve ever really considered much, despite the labyrinthine layout of the shop affording potential thieves with a wealth of opportunity. Occasionally in the past I have been unable to find books and assumed that perhaps theft had been their fate, but they’ve nearly all turned up eventually in different places. There seems to be something somehow less morally culpable about stealing a book than stealing, say, a watch. Perhaps it is that books are generally perceived as being edifying, and so acquiring the knowledge contained within them is of a greater social and personal value than the impact of the crime. Or, at least if it doesn’t outweigh the crime, then it certainly mitigates it. Irvine Welsh explored this idea in Trainspotting, when Renton and Spud are caught shoplifting from Waterstones. In court Spud admits that he stole the books to sell on, while Renton claims that he stole the copy of Kierkegaard with which he was found because he wanted to read it. When the sceptical magistrate challenges him on his knowledge of the existentialist philosopher, Renton replies:

  I am interested in his concepts of subjectivity and truth, and particularly his ideas concerning choice; the notion that the genuine choice is made out of doubt and uncertainty, and without recourse to the experience of others. It could be argued, with some justification, that it’s primarily a bourgeois, existential philosophy and would therefore seek to undermine collective social wisdom. However, it’s also a liberating philosophy, because when such societal wisdom is negated, the basis for social control over the individual becomes weakened and … but I am rabbiting a bit here. Ah cut myself short. They hate a smart cunt. It’s easy to talk yourself into a bigger fine, or fuck sake, a higher sentence. Think deference, Renton, think deference.

  The magistrate acquits Renton, but convicts Spud.

  In any case, I deeply dislike security cameras and would rather lose the occasional book than have that sort of intrusive monitoring in the shop. This is not Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  The smell of cat piss is back.

  Till total £236

  14 customers

  MONDAY, 3 MARCH

  Online orders: 9

  Books found: 8

  Another beautiful day, marred at an early stage by a customer wearing shorts and knee-length woollen socks who knocked over a pile of books and left them lying on the floor. Shortly afterwards, a whistling customer with a ponytail and what I can only assume was a hat he’d borrowed from a clown bought a copy of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, I suspect deliberately to undermine my faith in humanity and dampen my spirits further.

  A book we had sold on Amazon called Orient-Express: A Personal Journey, and which we had sent out three weeks ago, was returned today with a note from the customer that reads: ‘Unfortunately not as expected. Require a more pictorial version. Please exchange or refund.’ I suspect that the customer was treating us like an online library and had read the book.

  Eliot arrived at 5 p.m. for a visit of as yet unknown duration. I’m fairly sure he has a Festival board meeting some time during the week, but he hasn’t told me yet.

  Till total £90

  4 customers

  TUESDAY, 4 MARCH

  Online orders: 6

  Books found: 6

  The shop has a regular visitor who goes by the name of William, or Agnes, depending on whichever takes his or her fancy when he or she wakes up. As usual, he/she turned up with a bag of books to sell. William or Agnes is an octogenarian transgender man/woman from Irvine who drives a Reliant Robin. I’m not sure from which gender into whi
ch he/she has transitioned, hence the he/she thing here. He/she had massive hooped ear-rings on and was quite excited about the books he/she had brought in, which were, as always, rubbish. Gave him/her £4 for them. He/she spent some time complaining about the complexities of the benefits system, ending his/her rant with ‘I am a very busy man-stroke-woman.’

  Since being awarded the Book Town status, Wigtown has attracted increasing numbers of people who come here to sell books as well as to buy them. The concept of a Book Town originated with Richard Booth in the 1970s. He convinced booksellers to move to the Welsh Marches town of Hay-on-Wye, testing the theory that a town full of bookshops would encourage people to visit, and the economy could be re-invigorated. It worked, and the concept eventually arrived in Scotland. Wigtown’s Book Town project was launched in 1998. Although it was initially met with suspicion by many locals, it has changed the place for the better, and the town, in line with its motto, is flourishing once again. When I moved back here from Bristol in 2001, I recall reading a letter in the Galloway Gazette in which the correspondent – complaining that she could no longer buy a pair of socks in Wigtown – blamed the bookshops for this travesty. That resentment is all but gone now, and it would take a brave person to argue that the Book Town project hasn’t improved the lot of the town immeasurably. It’s not even possible to buy socks in the nearby market town of Newton Stewart these days. That woman must be incandescent by now.

  Bev dropped off a box of the mugs onto which she’s printed the cover of Gay Agony.

  Till total £57

  5 customers

  WEDNESDAY, 5 MARCH

  Online orders: 3