The Diary of a Bookseller Read online

  After lunch I drove to Dumfries and dropped Anna and Lucy at the railway station to return to London (each armed with a jar of wild garlic pesto) and was back in the shop by 4 p.m.

  For the last hour of the day the shop was occupied by a family of six – mum, dad and four girls aged between six and sixteen. When the time came to pay for their books, the mother told me that they had all been out for a walk in the morning and the girls had been miserable, despite the sunny weather. She had asked why they were so unhappy and they replied in unison that all they wanted to do was visit The Book Shop as they hadn’t been here for two years and were really excited about returning. They spent £175 and left with six bags of books. These things happen far too rarely, but when they do they serve as a welcome reminder of why I chose to enter the world of bookselling, and of how important bookshops are to many people.

  My mother came in at 4 p.m. and dropped off a box of three Creme Eggs for Easter. I’m not overly fond of chocolate, but my appetite for it is quite unsophisticated. Anna is very partial to extremely strong dark chocolate, as is Callum, and they regularly gang up to mock me for having the same taste as a small child. On the rare occasions during which I am afflicted by a craving, mine is for sugary milk chocolate and Creme Eggs are exactly what I want.

  After I had locked up I went to the co-op for milk and bread. Mike was working there, and he told me that the Cats Protection League had neutered the spraying cat he had trapped. He and Emma (his partner) have decided to keep it.

  Till total £288.48

  14 customers

  APRIL

  Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one.

  George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’

  Of course, one person’s good book is another person’s bad book; the matter is entirely subjective. One of my friends is a fine jewellery dealer in London. I once asked him how he decided what to buy and what not to buy when he was at auction. He explained that when he’d started out in the trade, he bought things that looked inoffensive and that – he considered – would have universal appeal. He quickly learned that these did not sell particularly well and rarely commanded a high price, so he changed his strategy – ‘Now, if I see something which evokes a strong reaction in me, I’ll buy it. Whether I absolutely adore it or utterly hate it, I can guarantee that I’ll get a good price for it.’

  Plenty of booksellers specialise. I don’t. The shop has as wide a range of subjects and titles as I can cram into it. I hope that there’s something for everybody, but even with 100,000 titles in stock many people still leave empty-handed. Whether someone buys a Mills and Boon for £2.50 or a bashed paperback copy of Spinoza’s Ethics for £2.50 is irrelevant. Each will, I hope, derive equal pleasure from the experience of reading.

  TUESDAY, 1 APRIL

  Online orders: 2

  Books found: 2

  Norrie came in and replaced the strip lights with chandeliers, plunging the Scottish room into darkness for the entire morning. They look infinitely better than the hideous strip lights, which lent the place the atmosphere of a hospital corridor. Over the years I’ve been replacing them and only have four left to do out of the twenty-two that were here when I took over in 2001.

  Andrew (the volunteer with Asperger’s) came in at 11 a.m. and worked until noon. He’s made it as far as the Cs in the crime section now but became very flustered when someone asked him where the railway books were, and had to have a sit down.

  This morning I received an email from my mother, who had to borrow my father’s iPad to send it because hers is ‘constipated’ – could I come down and fix it some time soon? I replied that I’d get round to it as soon as I could.

  At 3 p.m. I drove to the bank in Newton Stewart, returning just before closing to discover that Cash for Clothes had been and collected the boxes of books, and paid me £25 for them. They pay by weight and took away half a ton of books.

  In today’s post was a letter from Mrs Phillips (‘ninety-three and blind’) addressed simply to ‘Shaun Bythell, Book Dealer in Wigtown, Scotland’, which by virtue of Galloway being so unpopulated found its way here. As always, it was a request for a book for one of her great-grandchildren: this time Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

  Till total £71

  10 customers

  WEDNESDAY, 2 APRIL

  Online orders: 1

  Books found: 1

  The first visitor of the day was a wild-haired woman who regularly drops off the Green Handbook for Southwest Scotland, a booklet full of addresses of homeopaths and crystal healers. She came round when I was on the telephone. Every time she visits I’m on the telephone, so I never have the opportunity to tell her that I don’t want her to drop them off any more because nobody ever picks them up.

  She was closely followed by a couple in their late sixties, clad in clinging Lycra cycling gear. They came to the counter with four Wainwright Lakeland climbing books in nearly mint condition. The man put them on the counter and asked, ‘What can you do for me on those?’ so I added them up. The total came to £20, and I told him that he could have them for £17. He visibly winced, then replied, ‘Can’t you do them for £15?’ When I pointed out that would be a 25 per cent discount, he said, ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get.’ Finally they coughed up the £17 and left a trail of resentment in their wake.

  Till total £115.94

  10 customers

  THURSDAY, 3 APRIL

  Online orders: 6

  Books found: 5

  The day got off to a bad start with a telephone call from Carol-Ann at 8.50 a.m. telling me that she was outside and asking why the shop wasn’t open. I told her that I open at 9 a.m., came down and let her in. I had forgotten that she had called the previous afternoon to ask if it was all right to meet with one of her business clients in the kitchen. She works for a company that helps people to start small businesses and has a vast area to cover, so she often uses the shop as a place to hold meetings. She immediately accused me of looking rough and developing a bald patch. Nicky arrived shortly afterwards and agreed about both.

  Mother emailed me again to request assistance with her constipated iPad.

  After lunch I drove to Glasgow to look at a collection of railway books. It turned out to be an extremely good library, all in pristine condition. The seller was an old man who was dealing with his late brother’s estate. I gave him £400 for eight boxes. Books about railways are probably the best-selling subject in the shop, something I could never have imagined when I bought the business fifteen years ago.

  The day ended with an Association of Wigtown Booksellers’ (AWB) meeting here at 5.30 p.m. Tea, biscuits, etc. as usual. The discussion was largely about what we are going to do for a venue during the May festival now that the distillery has closed. It’s a bit embarrassing since the theme is whisky and most events were scheduled to take place in the distillery. The May festival is organised by the AWB, which comprises a handful of us who have bookshops in Wigtown. We have no budget, and the festival is run on a shoestring. Although it lacks the financial weight and big names of the September festival, it is slowly becoming part of Wigtown’s cultural calendar. Anne, one of the full-time festival employees, provides invaluable help with putting the programme together, and I suspect that without her it might not happen.

  The meeting went reasonably well, with the usual discussions about new signage, who is doing what, Joyce’s broken shoulder etc., but the highlight came when the subject of producing an app about the Wigtown Martyrs was brought up. Most of us were either vaguely supportive or indifferent to the idea, although two of the company held fairly extreme polar opposite opinions on the subject and a row ensued during which accusations of bigotry and prejudice were levelled across the table while the rest of us looked on in awkward embarrassment.

  The Wigtown Martyrs were two women who refused to wear the religious straitjacket of their day: the late seventeenth century. Du
ring that time dogma dictated that – among many other things – the king was recognised as the official head of the Church. In Scotland there was opposition to this, and the rebels were known as the Covenanters. They faced ruthless persecution by government forces in what became known as ‘The Killing Times’. Margaret Wilson and Margaret McLaughlan were two women of the covenant who were executed for their beliefs. They were tied to wooden stakes on the shore at the foot of Wigtown hill as the tide came in. The elder Margaret was tied further out in the hope that the younger Margaret, watching her drown, would change her mind and conform. She did not. There is a monument on the salt-marsh marking the site of the execution – the Martyrs’ Stake – and their graves are in the Church of Scotland cemetery in the town. Before they were taken to be drowned, they were imprisoned in the cell in the old tollbooth. This room is now known as the Martyrs’ Cell.

  It is unfortunate that Wigtown’s most famous daughters came to such an unedifying end. Wigtown has put forth many significant people into the world, among them Helen Carte, who (along with her husband Richard) ran the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company; Paul Laverty (who is Ken Loach’s screenwriter) was at Wigtown’s now defunct Catholic school; the botanist John McConnell Black and footballer Dave Kevan are sons of Wigtown too. Indeed, the actor James Robertson Justice – a one-time resident of the town – so loved the place that on a number of occasions he falsely claimed it as his birthplace.

  Till total £301

  14 customers

  FRIDAY, 4 APRIL

  Online orders: 3

  Books found: 1

  Three orders, all Amazon; only found one. One of the missing books was Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, which Nicky had listed as being on shelf Q6 in the Scottish room, despite its being a book about Afghanistan, written by a man who was born in Hong Kong. Perhaps the Scottish-sounding name confused her. As I was taking the sacks of mail over to Wilma, I bumped into Jock, who used to work in the shop when John Carter owned it. Jock is famous for his long-winded and frankly unlikely stories. They usually involve someone trying to trick him, and then him spotting their ruse and getting the better of them. Almost all of them end up in a fight, which he inevitably wins. He is notoriously difficult to understand both because of his strong accent and dialect, and because he has no teeth. Today he told me about a woman whose garden he works in once a week. According to Jock, she’s not a very good driver because of her poor vision. ‘She’s got carrots in her eyes.’

  At 12.15 p.m. a customer telephoned to tell me that he’d bought a book from us which was the first in a ‘triology’. It had cost him £7.20, including postage, and he was very happy with it. He now wants to buy volume II, but our copy of volume II is the only copy available online and is £200, which he wasn’t prepared to pay. He wanted it for the same price as he had paid for volume I. I tried to explain that as ours was the only copy available online it was a much more scarce book, and the price remained at £200. He told me he was ‘disgusted’ and hung up.

  Following a conversation with Anna, I am considering organising a Random Book Club event in London – probably a talk by an author, but the audience won’t know who the author will be until the talk starts. I emailed Robert Twigger, and he is happy to help out. Rob is a regular at Wigtown Book Festival, and normally stays in my house for the full ten days. He is a writer, and has won many awards and prizes: his best-known work is probably Angry White Pyjamas, for which he won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. He is an adventurer and an explorer, an extremely entertaining man, and I count myself very lucky to know him, and to have him as a good friend. He lived with his family in Cairo until the revolution of 2011, after which they decided to move back to the UK. He now lives in Dorset. During the September book festival last year I noticed that Eliot had unplugged one of my table lamps and had plugged in his Kindle. This was an affront on so many levels that when I pointed it out to Rob, he decided that the best form of revenge was to download a book called Two in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting onto it. I doubt whether his wife was terribly impressed.

  Callum and I went for a pint after I had closed the shop, then I nipped to the co-op for some milk. Mike was working, and he looked more than a little sheepish. I asked him how the newly neutered stray cat was settling in, and he told me that he had been verbally abused by a woman yesterday who had come into the co-op and accused him of stealing her cat. Apparently she had been looking for it for weeks, since it had run away. She was not best pleased to hear it has had its balls chopped off.

  Till total £103.99

  12 customers

  SATURDAY, 5 APRIL

  Online orders: 3

  Books found: 2

  Nicky in, as always fifteen minutes late and armed with an excuse which, however unlikely it sounds, I know is the truth. Today’s offering was that she’d dropped an éclair that she was eating (raided from the Morrisons skip) on her lap while she was driving and had to stop and clean her skirt before the chocolate melted into it. I made her a cup of tea in a different mug from her customary MacDonald tartan one. She is particularly fussy about bone china, and a common porcelain mug appeared to cause her undue confusion. Shortly after she arrived, Smelly Kelly, her Brut 33-soaked suitor appeared and tried to convince her to join him for some sort of family reunion. She was having none of it.

  One of today’s orders was for a book titled A History of Orgies.

  Another new Random Book Club member signed up today.

  At 11 a.m. an extremely large woman brought in six boxes of cookery books, mostly about dieting. I gave her £70 for them.

  After lunch I brought in the eight boxes of railway books I picked up on Thursday in Glasgow. As I was stacking them in the front of the shop, a man (who had managed to position himself so that I had to say ‘excuse me’ with every single box I brought in) asked me ‘Are those more boxes of books?’, as if he had unearthed a dark secret. When I told him that they were, he laughed loudly for an uncomfortably long time.

  When you deal with large numbers of different people every day, you start to notice behavioural patterns. One of the more curious for me is to see what people laugh at. I have no idea why that customer found it so unimaginably amusing that a bookseller was bringing boxes of books into a bookshop. Quite often it is something that isn’t the slightest bit amusing that triggers laughter, and even more frequently people will laugh at one of their own banal comments or observations. Sometimes it appears to be used as a sort of punctuation mark to denote the end of a sentence. I once bought a psychology library from a house in Cumbria, among which was a book called Laughter, by Robert R. Provine. According to him, only primates have the capacity to laugh, and ‘there are thousands of languages, hundreds of thousands of dialects, but everyone speaks laughter in pretty much the same way’. Nor is laughter particularly confined to humour; speakers tend to laugh 20 per cent more than their audiences. Despite this, and the fact that laughter is clearly social shorthand for amicability, the things at which customers laugh still baffle me.

  After work I went down to my parents’ house to fix Mum’s ‘constipated’ iPad. One of their friends was there, and we had a long conversation about pets, during which he confessed that he never gives his dogs food that he would not be prepared to eat himself. On a number of occasions this has resulted in him eating tinned dog food.

  Till total £345.87

  23 customers

  MONDAY, 7 APRIL

  Online orders: 6

  Books found: 6

  One order was for the Penguin edition of John Steinbeck’s letters, which we had listed a few weeks ago for £5. It sold online for £24. At the time of listing, ours was price-matched against the cheapest copy online, which must have sold, and ours has been re-priced against the next cheapest, which was £24. This usually works the other way round and books online become cheaper as dealers undercut one another.

  Our Amazon seller status has dropped from Good to Fair again, thanks to the unfulfilled orde
rs from Friday and Saturday.

  Sold a book called The Dieter’s Guide to Weight Loss During Sex to an American woman.

  When I was sorting through the books that a man had brought in in bin-liners on Saturday, I found a woven Victorian bookmark in a book onto which were stitched the words ‘I love little Pussy’ with a picture of a cat beneath it.

  The shop was extremely busy today, no doubt because it is school holiday time. At 5 p.m. a woman asked if her husband had left, so I told her that I had no idea who her husband was or what he looked like. She scowled and left.

  Email in the inbox at closing from Crail Bookshop in Fife, which has just closed down. They have 12,000 books that they want to sell, and offered me a chance to look at them with a view to buying. I declined. Trade stock has usually been run down and the best books removed before it is sold as a single lot.

  Another email from a collector in Edinburgh who has 13,000 books to sell. I replied asking for more information.