The Diary of a Bookseller Read online

  Books found: 3

  An Australian customer paid for a £1.50 book in small change but clearly had no idea what each coin was and took about five minutes to work it out. At one point he asked, ‘What do you use these 1p and 2p coins for?’

  Anna telephoned at 3 p.m. and we reminisced about a famous instance of her linguistic impressionism: the time her friend Sarah was visiting from America and we went to Glentrool in the Galloway Hills. Glentrool, apart from being a beautiful mountainous region, cut through by tumbling burns and dotted with lochs, was the site of an important battle in 1307 that marked the start of Robert the Bruce’s campaign against the English dominion of Scotland, culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. When we were walking to a waterfall there with Sarah, Anna explained to her that ‘Glentrool was where Robert the Burns took his last stand.’ And thus, in one short sentence, managed to confuse Robert the Bruce, Robert Burns and General Custer, and to rewrite the outcome of a critical battle in Scottish history.

  Till total £70.49

  11 customers

  THURSDAY, 6 MARCH

  Online orders: 7

  Books found: 7

  In the morning I unloaded the boxes of books about golf that I picked up from Callum’s on Saturday. I’ve tried to sell them on eBay as a job lot twice, but with no luck, so I will probably put them into the auction in Dumfries once I have checked whether there’s anything in there that’s worth listing online. Nicky can check that this weekend. The warehouse is starting to look a bit messy.

  A customer wearing a huge chunky gold cross on a chain asked, ‘Do you have a section for old Bibles and church things?’ I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by ‘church things’, so I pointed him at the theology section. We do have some beautiful and very cheap old Bibles, but the people who ask for them never, ever buy them. He managed to find an unpriced miniature Bible from 1870 and asked me what the price would be. I told him £4. He didn’t buy it. There must be some kind of psychological effect created by finding an unpriced book. Whatever price you suggest when asked, however low, seems to be more than the customer is prepared to pay. I have lost count of the number of times people have brought books to the counter that we have yet to price up and said, ‘This one’s got no price on it. It must be free.’ It wasn’t funny the first time, and fourteen years later it has completely lost the sheen it never had in the first place.

  Just before closing time a woman with a strong Yorkshire accent bought a cookbook and told me, ‘You’re not from round here.’ I replied that I was brought up here. Again, I have heard this so often that it is slowly driving me insane. She told me that my accent has a ‘strange twang’.

  Till total £47

  3 customers

  FRIDAY, 7 MARCH

  Online orders: 4

  Books found: 4

  When I came downstairs from breakfast to open the shop, I discovered that Nicky had already arrived and switched everything on. She greeted me with her usual melodic ‘Helloooo!’ before scampering upstairs to put whatever horrors she had raided from the Morrisons skip last night into the fridge.

  Eliot left at 2 p.m., leaving a pair of shoes behind, each shoe in a different room.

  This morning, as I was working my way through a couple of bags of books, I found a shopping list in one of them. The handwriting looked very like Nicky’s. Among the things on the list were ‘Hair Gunk’, ‘Leg Razors’ and ‘Witch Face Wash’. When I asked Nicky about the shopping list, she denied all knowledge, telling me that she doesn’t shave her legs during winter and offering to show me as evidence.

  At 2 p.m. I left the shop and drove to Dumfries to catch the London train and visit Anna in Hampstead for the weekend. I left Nicky with the thirty boxes of books about golf to check and list on Fulfilled By Amazon. She complained bitterly about it again, but reluctantly agreed to do it.

  Read Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner on the journey south, an extraordinarily modern book considering it was written in 1824.

  Till total £90.50

  6 customers

  SATURDAY, 8 MARCH

  In London.

  Till total £305.48

  28 customers

  MONDAY, 10 MARCH

  Online orders: 7

  Books found: 4

  Today was a beautiful sunny day. Callum called to see if I wanted to climb a hill, but I was alone in the shop so couldn’t.

  At about noon a young family came into the shop: parents with a boy of about seven and a girl of about nine. The boy went straight to the children’s section and immersed himself there for an hour, until his parents told him that it was time to go for lunch, at which point he reluctantly dragged himself away from the chair near the children’s books and pleaded with his mother to buy him a copy of The House at Pooh Corner. She came to the counter and paid the £2.50 for a paperback copy with a look of exasperation, saying ‘I’ve never come across a child who reads as much – all he does is read. He spends every penny of his pocket money on books.’

  Nicky didn’t manage to list a single book over the weekend because, as her note says: ‘The printer wilnae work.’ I checked: she hadn’t switched it on.

  Local news today is that Bladnoch distillery has gone into liquidation.

  Till total £47

  3 customers

  TUESDAY, 11 MARCH

  Online orders: 6

  Books found: 6

  Today was another beautiful day, and quite warm too. Nicky came in wisely wrapped up in scarf, hat and coat. Even on a cold day it is often warmer outside than it is in the shop.

  Much of today was spent going through boxes of books I’ve had in storage for a year. They came from a large Victorian house near Castle Douglas. It was snowing heavily when I picked them up a year ago. The van struggled to haul the load up the slippery hill back onto the main road as I was leaving, and I thought I might have to spend the night in the house with the strange man from whom I had bought them, but it managed to get away. As I had no storage space at the time, I put the boxes in storage at Callum’s along with the golf books. Among the books I sorted through today was a rare pamphlet signed by Seamus Heaney. Harrington in London is offering the only other copy online for £225, so I put mine up at £140.

  Old ladies’ art class upstairs – nobody died of exposure.

  When I was closing up, I decided to open the cat flap again in the hope that the intruder has become bored with bashing his head against it and found someone else’s house to piss in.

  Till total £49

  6 customers

  WEDNESDAY, 12 MARCH

  Online orders: 4

  Books found: 3

  Very quiet day.

  Just before closing, Mr Deacon appeared, looking flushed and flustered, and asked if I could order a book about James I for his aunt, whose ninetieth birthday is next Friday. As always, he produced a review from The Times and left it with me to order. It should be here next week.

  As I was locking up the back of the shop, I could hear the sound of geese honking on the salt-marsh at the bottom of the hill, the bleating of new-born lambs in the fields and the croaking of frogs in the pond in the garden. No people. No traffic. Growing up in rural Scotland, sounds like these are the familiar indicators of seasonal change, and for me the onset of spring is the highlight of the year. Once you’ve lived in a city for a few years, I suppose there’s a detachment from these signals of seasonal shift to which the frogs, the lambs and the geese – spring’s harbingers from the water, the land and the sky – alert you.

  Till total £28.49

  4 customers

  THURSDAY, 13 MARCH

  Online orders: 4

  Books found: 4

  Nicky was in today as she’s taking tomorrow off (Friday and Saturday are her usual two days). She began the day by complaining about the smell of cat pee again. I told her that it’s a stray, and that Mike in the co-op has borrowed a trap from Cats Protection and is trying to catch it. She still blamed Captain. Mi
ke’s garden backs onto mine and Captain is as frequent a visitor in his kitchen as his cats are in mine. The stray has been spraying in his house too.

  Eliot has asked me to help write a business plan for The Open Book idea so that we can work out if it can stand on its own financially. If it can, then it will operate under the umbrella of the Festival Company. The Open Book is a plan that Anna, Finn and Eliot have come up with: they want to take an empty shop in the town that has accommodation above it and give people the opportunity to come and run it for a fortnight so that they know what it is like be a bookseller. Finn is a friend from childhood who lives nearby. He’s an organic dairy farmer, and one of the wittiest people I know. About ten years ago he was co-opted to be the chairman of what was then the Wigtown Festival volunteer group. Within a year he had turned it into the Wigtown Festival Company, a charity (which meant it could access new funds), and transformed it from a few inexperienced but enthusiastic volunteers into a slick, professional organisation with full-time, paid staff. After a few years off, he is now back on the board of trustees. I thought I’d do some research for the business plan, so I googled ‘Run a Bookshop’. Ironically, top of the list is a book for sale on Amazon called The Complete Guide to Starting and Running a Bookshop.

  In the early afternoon I received a phone call from a woman at Yell.com regarding my Yellow Pages advert and online listing. She asked me if my business was ‘located in Wigwamshire’, which she referred to as a ‘locality area’, and continued that she would give me ‘an example, for example’. She also described my Yell.com web site as having a ‘completely different look, but very similar’. To what, I have no idea.

  Seven people brought boxes of books to the shop to sell today. As is often the way at this time of year, I bought more than I sold.

  Till total £120

  9 customers

  FRIDAY, 14 MARCH

  Online orders: 3

  Books found: 2

  No Nicky today. She is de-cluttering, apparently. One of today’s online orders was for a book about instruments measuring radioactivity, for a customer in Iran. At 11.30 a.m. the telephone rang. It was Nicky: ‘Do you want my fridge? I am getting rid of everything that runs on electricity.’ The moment she opens her mouth a gem of some sort will emerge, fully formed.

  Mother appeared at 2 p.m. with four hanging baskets for the front of the shop, all planted up. She does this every year, despite my protestations that I am quite capable of doing it myself.

  Till total £42

  3 customers

  SATURDAY, 15 MARCH

  Online orders: 3

  Books found: 2

  Today’s first customer was a short man with a wispy beard who suddenly appeared at the counter, startling me. He grinned and said, ‘You’ve got some stuff here, haven’t you? Some stuff. Some stuff.’ He bought a copy of The Hobbit. I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.

  After lunch a customer asked if we had a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. We didn’t, but a few moments after he had left, a woman brought in two boxes of books to sell, one of which contained a copy. It’s much more rewarding when this happens the other way around.

  Till total £78.98

  13 customers

  MONDAY, 17 MARCH

  Online orders: 7

  Books found: 6

  One of today’s orders was for a book called Sexing Day-Old Chicks.

  The first customer of the day was an unusually smartly dressed Maltese woman who told me that there are no second-hand bookshops in Malta. I’m not quite sure what she was doing in Wigtown, but she seemed pleasant, even if she didn’t buy anything. Just as she was leaving, the telephone rang. It was the librarian from Samye Ling Buddhist centre in Eskdalemuir, about sixty miles away. They have been clearing old stock and want to sell some of it. I have arranged to visit them next week.

  My mother came into the shop when it was fairly busy and started to share her less than flattering opinions about the SNP at considerable volume. She comes from the west of Ireland, and despite having lived in Scotland for nearly fifty years, retains the lilt of the country of her childhood. Or so I am assured by my friends – it is undetectable to my ear. She has a capacity for talking that I am quite convinced is unparalleled in the world, and she abhors a silence the way that nature abhors a vacuum. On several occasions I have witnessed her say the same thing (normally a description of what she had for lunch that afternoon, or where she went that morning) in over a dozen different ways in a single breath. My father, by contrast, is a quiet man. This he attributes to the lack of opportunity to speak afforded by my mother’s incessant babble. He is a tall man, 6 foot 3, and trained as an engineer, but he turned to farming in his late twenties. Between them, they have managed to build several businesses and send my two sisters and me to boarding school.

  Unannounced visits from family and friends are not uncommon and are certainly not the exclusive preserve of my mother. Familiar visitors often openly talk about things I would not deem fit for strangers’ ears. It often strikes me that perhaps bookshops primarily play a recreational role for most people, being peaceful, quiet places from which to escape the relentless rigours and digital demands of modern life, so that my friends and family will quite happily turn up unannounced and uninvited to interrupt whatever I happen to be doing with little or no regard for the fact that it is my workplace. If I was working in the co-op or the library, I doubt whether they’d take such a cavalier approach to casual social visits. Nor, I suspect, would they speak quite so freely in the company of complete strangers in any other workplace.

  After I had closed the shop I called Mr Deacon to let him know that the biography of James I he ordered has arrived.

  Till total £41

  4 customers

  TUESDAY, 18 MARCH

  Online orders: 2

  Books found: 2

  The morning was cold and damp, so I lit the fire. By 11 a.m. there had been five customers through the door; not one of them bought anything. Then a tall, emaciated man in a hoodie came in and asked if we had any books on pharmacology because ‘they’ve just put me on this new heroin substitute and I want to find out more about it’.

  Mr Deacon appeared at lunchtime and paid for the book he’d ordered. His aunt’s birthday is on Saturday, so he should have time to send it to her.

  Till total £82.99

  9 customers

  WEDNESDAY, 19 MARCH

  Online orders: 2

  Books found: 2

  At 10.30 a.m. I went upstairs to make a cup of tea. When I came back downstairs, I was met with a familiar, earthy smell. No sooner had I sat down and started listing books than a short, very scruffy, bearded Irishman shot out from behind a shelf. His appearance (and smell) disguise a man whose knowledge of books is remarkable. He brings me a load of good material about twice a year, delivered in his van, in which he clearly lives. This time he brought four boxes of books on railways and two boxes of books about Napoleon, for which I gave him £170.

  At 2 p.m. the telephone rang. It was a woman at the council whose job it is to find work for people with learning difficulties:

  Woman: ‘We have a young man looking for work in a bookshop. He has Asperger’s syndrome. Have you heard of Asperger’s syndrome?’

  Me: ‘Yes.’

  Woman: ‘Well, you know how some people with Asperger’s are really good at one specific thing, like maths or drawing?’

  Me: ‘Yes.’

  Woman: ‘Well, he’s not like that.’

  So I agreed to take him on for a trial period. He starts on Tuesday.

  Before the shop closed I stamped and bagged all the books for the Random Book Club, and (hopefully) charmed Wilma into sending the postman over in his van tomorrow to pick them up.

  After years of buying, pricing, listing and selling books, certain publishers become very familiar to you: the significant quantities of books published by Macmillan
in the early twentieth century; Blackie and Son with their distinctive Talwin Morris cover illustrations; A. & C. Black, with their famous Scottish travel guides; Fullarton and Cassell, two short-lived publishers who along with Newnes and Gresham embraced the technological revolution that enabled paper to be made from wood pulp in the mid-nineteenth century, and all of whose publications are distinctive for their waxy pages; Ward Lock, with their series of red travel guides to the UK; David & Charles, of Newton Abbot, whose books on regional railways are second to none; Hodder and Stoughton, who published the once desirable King’s England series, now no longer sought after; and Nelson, whose red cloth editions of John Buchan’s works still sell in healthy numbers.

  Others stand out less for their design or style, and more for their content. Take Hooper and Wigstead, the publisher of Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, whose pages contain the very first version to appear in a book of Burns’s Tam o’Shanter; William Creech, who published Sir John Sinclair’s first Statistical Account of Scotland – and introduced the word ‘statistic’ to the English language; John Wilson, who produced the Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect; John Murray, the publisher of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; William Strahan, who brought Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations to the world.

  More recent publishers have had a similar impact: Penguin, whose unexpurgated British edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover saw them end up in court; Shakespeare & Company, who dared to publish Ulysses; small presses such as William Morris’s short-lived Kelmscott Press; and the Golden Cockerel Press, for whom the artist Eric Gill (the typeface designer behind Gill Sans, Perpetua and others) designed a typeface which he named after the press. The list goes on, but these publishers – these individuals – took risks and brought new ideas to the world, each with their own distinctive style, from their subject matter to their design, typography and production values.