The Path Through the Trees

by Christopher Milne

  So the process of choosing is different. With books it takes place at home, inspired perhaps by a review or a television programme. With the picture it takes place in the shop, rather as women choose hats.

  So what happened was this.

  I would look through publishers’ samples, seeing them all, liking some, disliking others, buying those I liked and hoped might be saleable, buying also those I knew would be saleable but liked rather less. From this selection of loose prints I then, later, picked out those I wanted to frame for stock. Framed prints always sold better than unframed: they looked better, you could display them better, and there they were, all ready for hanging on the wall. Which ones did I choose? How could I not include some of my favourites? After all they were going to decorate our showroom before they decorated some private living-room: we were going to have to live with them first. And how could I not, when customers came in to look around, point them out with special affection put in a friendly word on their behalf, and hope that my feelings might be shared? Alas, they weren’t. Once again it was a Tretchikoff or a moonlit sea that took their fancy. Once again I had to listen to words which, though they no doubt came fresh and spontaneous to their lips, were words that I had heard before. In the end I could bear it no longer. We took our unsold pictures home and hung them on our own walls. The rest of the stuff we sold off cheap to be rid of it.

  Such was the fate of our modern reproductions. Now for the picture framing.

  If you set up as a picture framer a thing you must quickly decide is whether or not you will accept customers’ own pictures. It is what might be called a wedge-shaped decision. For if at first you say ‘Yes, choose one of our prints and we will frame it for you’, you are led on to accept similar prints that had been acquired elsewhere, to accept awful prints that could only have been acquired elsewhere, to accept family photographs and amateur oils. And the curious thing I found was that my own distaste was so often matched by that of my customers. They didn’t like the picture any more than I did; and so they would want me to frame it as cheaply as possible. And then, to save themselves even that expense, they would fail to call back for it. Picture framers are often used as dumping grounds in this way. It eases the conscience of the dumper that he’s ‘done something about it’. Understandably he wants to do as little as possible.

  From making frames it is a short step to repairing them: to replacing broken glass, refixing corners that are falling apart; remounting and rebacking where the mildew has got in. This was depressing work and I would spend weeks not doing it and Lesley would spend weeks apologizing on my behalf: so our dislike of it was shared.

  As our business grew, I tried various ways of relieving the pressure; for I was, after all, a bookseller. First I tried sending some of the work to London; later I got someone in to help me here. But in the end the worm triumphed. A friend of mine, an artist who also framed pictures, closed his own business down at about the same time. We compared experiences and found much in common. On his last day he had assembled all the pictures that, over the years, his customers had brought in for framing, brought and never returned to collect – the smirking children, the alderman in his robes, the certificates. . . . I knew them all – and he had carried them out and lined them up at one end of his backyard, and at the other end he had assembled a pile of stones. . . .

  Our own uncollecteds met a less violent end: one at a time, and with a decent interval between them, they were slipped into a tea chest and put out with the rubbish.

  REASONS

  So for a while we were picture framers and print dealers. Then we gave it up. In the same way we ran a lending library, starting when Smiths and Boots closed down, getting our books from a man who supplied a chain of West Country shops, ran it for a while, enjoyed it for a while, then closed it down. Dilettantism? Did we simply flit from one thing to another like a butterfly, unable to do anything properly, giving up as soon as the going became hard and the first flame of enthusiasm had burnt itself out? You could say this. You could also say that we only ran a line while it was profitable, dropping it as soon as profits fell. Neither alone is the whole truth.

  Whatever one does, whatever one sells, affects a number of different people and it affects them in different ways. It affects us personally; it affects our staff; it affects our shop, its profitability, its reputation and its prospects; it affects the local population; and it affects or may affect our suppliers and other traders. All this should be taken into account when deciding what or what not to sell. One may say, ‘To hell with Mr So-and-so up the road’, but at least one says it: the decision to compete against him is a conscious one and his possible reactions are anticipated. One may consider net profit more important than customer satisfaction: that is a personal matter. But both have to be considered.

  In describing some of the ‘other goods’ that we sold and then stopped selling I have made no attempt to justify our decisions, no attempt to draw up a balance sheet of arguments in favour and against. For this is not a manual on retailing; it is the self-portrait of an individual. All the same, I feel I ought to add that there were reasons other than my own personal taste in Art that turned us against pictures. Nor did we altogether abandon our customers when we closed down our library and our framing. We handed them on, together with our books and our mouldings, to those who took over when we left off.

  And now to turn to a question that is surely pressing for an answer: where, in a shop that I have described as small, did we find room for all these varied activities?

  ROOM UPSTAIRS

  With cards, with pictures and with our library the choice was a simple one: do we or don’t we. But in 1956 an event occurred that called for a much harder decision. In 1956 Clare was born.

  So now we had not just an extra mouth to feed, but for a time at least only one of us at work to feed it. There was thus an immediate need to increase our earnings, to expand our business. The question was how, and the answer clearly lay upstairs. We were living over the shop and this was fine while there were only two of us. Indeed we would not have wished to live anywhere else. How nice that Lesley could go upstairs and get something ready for lunch while I was still serving down below. How nice that we could linger together over our meal, with the bell on the shop door (it was a home-made device, of course) set to ring when anybody came in. What fun it was, sitting at our table by the window, to be able to look down on Dartmouth life going about its everyday business. Dartmouth was that sort of town: we were all by turns either actors or spectators; and so probably ours were not the only eyes to watch the young man from the yacht courting Sylvia from the ironmonger’s. Nor did it matter that we hadn’t got a garden – or even a backyard for drying the washing. We had a washing line in the attic, and the country was so close that we didn’t need a garden – not yet at any rate. On a sunny day we could take our lunch and eat it sitting on a grassy hillside looking down over the rooftops to the river. In the evenings we could stroll down to Sugary Cove or find a pleasant spot among the rocks below the footpath that leads to Compass Cove, or cross the river by the Lower Ferry and walk along the railway line to the Higher Ferry, so getting the last of the evening sun. It was a new experience for us to live, to work and to find our recreation all in the same place; and for five years we enjoyed it.

  With Clare’s impending arrival, however, we had to think again; and there could be no doubt that the time had now come to look for a separate house, one moreover with the garden that we were both now beginning to long for. If we moved out from the shop, this would leave us with four vacant rooms. Here, clearly – though in a way yet to be decided – was the source of our extra income.

  I seem to remember that our first thought was to let the rooms as offices, but the problem would then have been to provide separate access. In the end we decided to turn the first floor – our old dining-room, kitchen and sitting-room – into a showroom. Selling what? Not books or cards or Dartmouth prints. For the extra sales we might hope to make would
not be in proportion to the considerable amount of extra space we would have available. It would have to be something quite different.

  The answer can be given in a single word. It was a word we disliked, but we searched in vain for another and in the end we had to accept it. It was ‘gifts’; and so the Harbour Bookshop became the Harbour Bookshop and Gift Gallery. Having decided on our new name we then had to decide exactly what it would encompass. Things made of wood, obviously; perhaps also things made of pottery. What else?

  The advantage of being a gift shop is that you can sell almost anything as the fancy takes you – and as the fancy seems to be taking your customers. You can sell it one year and you can stop selling it the next: you are not committed. You can sell china, and it won’t make you a china shop. You can sell tables and chairs, and it won’t make you a furniture shop. You can sell bedspreads and tea cloths without becoming a draper, fire-irons and frying pans without becoming an ironmonger, jewellery without becoming a jeweller, dried herbs and dried flowers without becoming a grocer or a florist. Indeed over the years we have sold all these things. Moreover (and not surprisingly) what we had found with cards and pictures we now found with gifts: there were those we liked very much and those we liked very little. Once again we chose only what we liked; and in order to avoid being influenced by over-persuasive salesmen, for our first few years we did almost all our choosing through the Design Centre in London.

  Gradually we established our contacts and built up our stock. Gradually our bookshop customers discovered that we now had an upstairs department. ‘But we’ve had it for years!’ The holidaymakers knew all about it, of course; it was our regulars who failed to notice, seeing only what they had always seen. Odd how familiarity blunts observation.

  Today Lesley does all the buying, and I don’t envy her. She does most of it at the annual Gift Trade Fair in Torquay, placing enormous orders in January for what she hopes to sell in July and August. How can she know? What instinct tells her that the pottery cruets that were so popular one year will not sell at all the next? Pokers with coloured knobs, teak mice, gaily decorated tin trays and egg prickers: each in turn had its year and was then forgotten, abandoned by the public in their search for the latest novelty. What will it be this year? Spoon rests? Today half our showroom – the old sitting-room half – sells kitchenware. The other half sells pottery and glass and table mats and . . . and . . . Yes, Lesley is quite right: I really do hardly know. How soon one loses touch. Once I did all the buying. Now I’m scarcely even aware of what is bought.

  Not long ago I met Kathleen in the street. She said she had been to Newton Abbot to get a picture framed, and the man there had told her that a lot of people came to him from Dartmouth. ‘Surely Dartmouth could support its own framer,’ he had said; and she had passed this observation on to me. Might I be interested? ‘Oh, no. Not now,’ I said. ‘We used to do picture framing, as I expect you remember. I did it myself, in fact, and enjoyed it. But that was twenty years ago. Then for various reasons we gave it up.’ ‘You wouldn’t think of starting up again?’ ‘No. I couldn’t go back to it. . . . Anyway I’m too busy doing other things.’ ‘It was just a thought.’ She smiled and went in to the baker’s, and I went on towards the bookshop. I could have told her exactly why I had enjoyed it so much and exactly why I had given it up and exactly why there was no going back. For I had been thinking about just these things: I was in the middle of writing this chapter.

  7. Books

  CHOOSING

  For twenty-one years Lesley and I lived on the profits of our shop and the bulk of this came from bookselling. We had no other source of income. I say this loudly and proudly. Loudly, because a number of people seem to have suspected that all the while Pooh’s earnings were keeping my pockets comfortably lined. Proudly, because it is not easy to survive as a bookseller – in fact as well as in name – in a town whose population is under seven thousand.

  I have already described how we started, going round other bookshops, studying their stock, going round publishers to see what they had to offer, then making our choice and sending in our orders. And at once there will be seen a similarity to gift buying – and a difference. The similarity is that booksellers do in fact choose what they had to offer, then making our choice and sending in our because we have chosen it and ordered it. No book arrives uninvited. ‘Don’t they send them down to you automatically?’ we are asked. Indeed they don’t. Nor can we automatically send them back to their publishers if we fail to sell them; and so there may well be books on our shelves whose continued presence we are beginning to regret. But at least we have no one to blame but ourselves. That is the similarity.

  The difference is that our choice is made from the entire range of books published. In theory (if not quite in practice) the books that we stock on, for instance, wild flowers have been chosen as being the most suitable for our needs of all that are available: the others for one reason or another we have rejected. This is not so with gifts. With gifts we stock what takes our fancy and it does not bother us that there might be something a little better that we don’t know about. With gifts our customers choose from what they see: if they like what they see they buy it, if not they walk out. With books this is only partly what happens. For in addition there are those customers who come in asking for a particular book. And our stock must aim to satisfy them as well.

  So the question that everybody asks us is: ‘How do you know what books people are going to want? How do you know what to buy?’

  First let me say that, although we are influenced by reviews, we do not wait until they appear before deciding; for this would be leaving it far too late. Every book has a publication date. On this date – but not before – it may be reviewed. On this date – but not before – it should be available in bookshops. It is launched with a fanfare of trumpets, a fanfare that would be incomplete without the bookseller’s participation. Sometimes customers say to us: ‘I’ve seen it in London, but probably it hasn’t got down here yet.’ This infuriates us. If we haven’t got the book in stock when it is in stock in London, it is because we have decided against stocking it, not because Dartmouth is a small provincial town two hundred miles away and we have to wait our turn.

  So most of our choosing is done before the book is published. We may do it from a publisher’s catalogue or we may do it as a result of advance publicity, but most often and most satisfactorily we do it with the help and advice of the publisher’s representative. Books come flooding in on two great annual tides, the spring tide and the autumn tide, and so ideally a representative will call twice a year, showing us spring books in March and autumn books in September.

  What does he carry with him? Sometimes the book itself and this can be helpful; but it is not always either necessary or possible. We may not need to see it to know whether or not we want it; or it may not be possible to see it because completed copies are not yet available, or because the representative’s bag is not big enough or his arm is not strong enough to carry all the seasonal offerings of his firm. If we are shown the book it is not so that we can sit down and read it before deciding whether or not we want it. Only if it is very short – a book of cartoons or a children’s picture book – might we have time for that. In any case reading a book does not always make it easier to arrive at a wise decision. We are not after all buying for ourselves. We are buying for our customers, trying to anticipate their reactions, their demand. Is this a book they will hear about and come in and ask for? Is it a book that will catch their eye and arouse their interest? These are the questions we must ask ourselves; not: ‘Did I myself enjoy it?’ One book in a hundred we may be able to sell by communicating our own personal enthusiasm – and doing this is one of the supreme pleasures of bookselling – but the other ninety-nine must be able to sell themselves. So we must know our customers, know their book-buying tastes (not their book-reading tastes, for this is quite another matter), and be able to put ourselves in their position as they watch a television interview
with the author, or read a review, or see the book in our shop. What are the factors that influence their choice? The subject? The author’s name? The price? The book’s appearance? Its jacket design? The general excitement or controversy that will surround its publication? Sometimes the one, sometimes the other. I have met books whose success depended almost wholly on choice of title, and I have met others whose title alone condemned them to failure. These are all things the representative can tell us about. ‘Macramé? What on earth is that?’ I asked – as everybody must have asked, meeting the word for the first time. So he told me about this little known craft and advised me that it might soon become very popular. He was right – and I was ready with my copies when the demand came.

  A book to us, then, is very much more than a piece of writing. It is the joint product of author, typographer, paper-maker, printer, binder, jacket designer and publisher’s publicity department. It is a rectangular object possessing certain qualities; and one of its most important qualities is that alone, all by itself, it is quite useless. To achieve fulfilment it must find a buyer. So if we keep only one eye on our stock, it is so that we can keep our other eye on our customers. In fact, of the two, the eye that studies the customer is almost the more important.

  Lesley and I are conscious of this when engaging a new assistant. A girl who likes people – who is friendly and helpful and makes them feel welcome – is far more use to us than one who likes books. Books don’t need to be liked: people do. Books don’t mind if you are rude to them or offhand in your manner: people do. A bookshop is like a marriage bureau: it arranges meetings between likely partners – likely book and likely buyer. The introduction may be a formal one. ‘Mr Smith, I would like you to meet this book: I think you might enjoy it.’ Or it might be more casual – so placing the book that Mr Smith’s eye will fall on it and his hand will reach out towards it. . . . This is the art of bookbuying and bookselling: knowing your customers, knowing their tastes, realizing that their tastes are constantly changing, anticipating what they will be next season, choosing your stock accordingly and then so displaying it that you achieve the maximum number of introductions leading to the maximum number of happy marriages.