Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

by Shaun Bythell

  I have a regular antiquarian customer who, although his bill when he comes to the counter is usually in three figures, always manages to leave you feeling as though he’s robbed you the moment he’s left the shop. He’s retired, clearly well off, and he has an eclectic interest in rare books. The last time he was in, I had, earlier that day, bought a collection of books from a hugely entertaining elderly man whose family had clearly had both feet on one of the higher rungs of the social ladder. The books had once rested comfortably on the shelves of a stately home – they had the library stamps you always wish to see when you encounter an antiquarian book collection, with heraldic crests and a lingering smell of wood smoke from a fire stoked by a servant – but it was obvious that hard times had befallen the family, and the house had gone. I suspect these were the last remnants of the library, delivered in supermarket bread boxes. I can’t remember exactly what I paid for them, but I took his contact details because there were a few things which I didn’t have time to research and value, and I wanted to be able to reimburse him in the event that I had underpriced them, including a two-volume set of – I think – Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, illustrated and inscribed by Aubrey Beardsley. The antiquarian came to the shop and raked through the newly acquired stock, eventually stumbling across the Beardsley set. He asked what I wanted for it, and without the opportunity to research, I told him £800, which he (surprisingly) happily paid. Several months later, I bumped into him at a book festival in Carlisle, after which he proudly told me that he’d sold the books for £19,000 at a London auction.

  As a bookseller, I feel it is incumbent on me to be fair to the people from whom I’m buying books. I felt cheated, not for me, but for the man from whom I’d bought the books. If I had put them into the same sale, and they’d made £19,000, I would have written him a cheque for most of that amount to salve my conscience. Yes, caveat emptor, and caveat vendor; we all love a bargain, but there’s more to this than just money. Nobody likes to feel they’ve been shafted. The antiquarian knew I hadn’t had the opportunity to find out more. If he’d offered to split the £19,000 with the person from whom I’d bought the books, and cut me out, I would have been more than happy.

  Such encounters notwithstanding, it saddens me that the antiquarian is, it appears, a dying breed. The same could be said of most book collectors. They appear in fewer numbers each year. Information is no longer the preserve of books, and as such, books perhaps appear to be less valuable as sources than they once were. One of my parents’ friends, Brian, collects books by Jeffery Farnol, an author so unfashionable that I stopped buying his books several years ago. I’ve told Brian as much on a number of occasions, but despite this, when he’s in Scotland, he never fails to call into the shop and ask if I have any fresh Farnol in stock. He has a list, handwritten in a tatty notebook, and bursts in with an optimistic enthusiasm which I consistently fail to reflect. I never have anything he’s looking for, largely because I’ve put all of my Farnol stock into the recycling, and it pains me to consider a future when he finally stops coming to visit. I doubt whether anyone else will ask me for Jeffery Farnol titles again until I close the door of the shop for the last time, unless he enjoys the sort of unexpected revival that Winston Graham’s Poldark novels received following a BBC production of the series made famous by the actor Aidan Turner removing his shirt several times during each episode.

  Type five

  SPECIES: MECHANICUS IN DOMO SUA (HOME MECHANIC)

  These customers are an absolute delight. They’re looking for a Haynes manual for a Land Rover, usually, and are never disappointed when you don’t have one, and always overjoyed when you do happen to have a copy. They don’t read anything other than books about cars, but who cares? They read what they want to read, like everyone, and have literally nothing in the way of literary pretensions. I love and respect them. They are joyous in their passions and deserve nothing but the highest praise. They will devour their literary prey with more enthusiasm than the Oxford Professor of Early Chaucerian Manuscripts finding an early Caxton Press piece of incunabula. And they deserve it. They want information, and whether it’s the diameter of a spark plug for a 1947 Suffolk Punch lawnmower or the gearbox specifications for a 1976 Ford Cortina, it matters not. These are the people for whom movable type ought to have been invented – the people who use the written word to actually do something practical with it. Not those who pretend that it was only ever there to promote their particular flavour of religious bigotry or confirm their belief in some sort of spurious wisdom about water-divining or dream analysis, or to convince themselves that their bungalow in Slough is at the confluence of six ley lines and, as such, should be subject to status as a national monument, when in reality it should be at the sharp end of an army of bulldozers.

  The home mechanic always enters the shop nervously, and often in oily overalls, and brims with joy when you tell them that you do stock old Haynes manuals. Even if you don’t have the one they’re looking for, they’ll always find one relating to a car that one of their friends is working on. When I lived in Bristol, I had a friend who was constantly buying old cars and repairing them. He used to refer to Haynes manuals as ‘The Haynes Book of Lies’ because there was always some piece of wiring, or a brake fluid reservoir, which failed to match the reality of the vehicle on which he was working at that particular time.

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  As far as the genus Peritus or Expert is concerned, on the whole, it is types one and two whom you literally want to kick out of the shop. Type one is normally just there to boast. Their husband/wife will have become so cataclysmically bored with their company over the years that they’ve tuned them out completely, and a bookshop provides the perfect location for them to deliver their lecture. For type two, politics is quite a popular theme. They are normally completely oblivious to the fact that their victim may not share their views, no matter how extreme. Climate change (denial, usually), same-sex marriage (disapproval, usually) and Europe (let’s not go there) are their usual stock-in-trade, and the greater the indifference with which their opinions are met, the louder they feel the need to shout about them. Types three and five fall into the increasingly scarce category of people you would want to have supper with, while type four falls into the category of people who owe you several suppers, and an expensive bottle of wine, neither of which you will ever see.

  * For some reason he’s convinced himself that he’s descended from King Alfred the Great, and it has been my grave misfortune to have been exposed to his wildly unlikely and frankly incomprehensible research into his genealogy over far too many years.

  2

  Genus: Familia Juvenis (Young Family)

  My first Latin teacher was a Church of Scotland minister who was banished to a remote parish in the Galloway uplands – no doubt following some scandal – and who used to chain-smoke during our seemingly interminable lessons in the language. Our desks were from the 1930s and consisted of a single unit, with a cast-iron base frame on which was perched a box-like object on which you could write and in which you could store books, and a folding wooden bench that I can only assume was designed by a committee of sadists. The reason for the seat being hinged was so that when a member of staff entered the classroom, you could flip it up and move instantly from an uncomfortably seated position to an even more uncomfortable standing position to show entirely undeserved reverence to whoever had wandered into the room. The box-like part of the desk had an inkwell in the top right-hand corner – a legacy of the days of the fountain pen, but no longer required in the halcyon times of the Bic biro. This redundant feature made an ideal ashtray for the Latin teacher, and by the end of the first week of each term, every single desk in his classroom looked as though it had been adorned with an overflowing ashtray, like a table from a 1970s pub at closing time. It would be unfair to blame my appalling grasp of Latin on any of this – my lazy mind is far more likely to be the cause – but I suspect that even I might have managed to work out that Familia Juvenis means
Young Family.

  This – like every genus – has subtle (but distinct) subgroups, all of which you would be well advised to avoid. I have a young family of my own, and frequently go to considerable lengths to keep all members of it at a distance, something they appear to reciprocate. Everyone who has made the mistake of reproducing will understand this. Before I had a family, I was deeply resentful of young families coming into the shop. I make great efforts to keep the shop clean, tidy and well organised. Nobody wants sticky-fingered children getting stuck into shelves, particularly when they contain rare and valuable books. Now, though, I understand. I understand both that there is nothing you can do to stop children behaving the way that they do and that their parents still want to have a tiny dose of culture in a world of nappies, Peppa Pig and vomit. I understand their reasons for bringing their children into a bookshop and leaving them in a corner so that they might escape for a minute or two and stumble across an unknown John Buchan title, or a paperback copy of Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve – a book so short, so perfect and so digestible that it might as well have been written for parents of young children, whose only opportunity to read comes in the precious seconds between the wipe of an arse and a feed.

  Type one

  SPECIES: PARENTES LASSI (EXHAUSTED PARENTS)

  More often than not, this is a couple with several children, at least one of whom is under a year old. The purpose of their visit is – as with most of their activities – an attempt either to exhaust their children as much as their children exhaust them (mainly with pointless outdoor activities) or to find some way of distracting them so that they, the parents, can have a moment’s peace. I have two sisters, and when we were young – under ten – my father, an incredibly creative and inventive man, would spend hours trying to work out a way of harnessing our childish energy (which largely manifested itself in running around, climbing in the hay barn and screaming at one another) in a way that meant we would still be happy, but which he could use to power something on the farm. In the end, I think he drew the line when he realised that his best idea was to put us all in a hamster wheel in the dairy and use the energy to run the suction pumps on the milking machines. On a rainy day, which, let’s face it, is not uncommon in the south of Scotland, this is where the book-shop comes in. Our children’s section – while not a patch on the children’s bookshop next door – is fairly decent, and the moment they’ve dumped their children there, their parents can usually find something to keep them occupied for a few moments while they sneak off to the leather armchairs by the fire and slump, heads hanging, until the tranquillity is shattered by one or all of the children.

  Type two

  SPECIES: PUER RELICTUS (ABANDONED CHILD)

  Admittedly, this is extremely rare, but occasionally a parent – usually a father on his own – will come in with a small child, put the obliging infant in the children’s section with a book, then walk slowly to the front door and quietly open it, before shouting to whoever happens to be working in the shop, ‘Could you keep an eye on them? I’ll be back in a minute’, and sprinting off at full tilt. Normally the ‘minute’ is anywhere between a quarter of an hour and an hour. On the whole, the child appears to be accustomed to this sort of thing, and will sit patiently reading until the parent returns, full of insincere apologies and unconvincing excuses. The father in this instance is usually someone whom you would least expect to desert his daughter or son. He’s likely to be dressed in corduroy trousers, a nice woollen jumper (clearly not chosen by him) and a pair of shoes that would suggest that he might have a proper job; from their superior quality, evidently not one working in a bookshop.

  I have a relatively new member of staff in the shop: Gillian, the Ginger Menace. She’s worked here for about a year, part-time, but she bears the weighty burden of having worked in the Edinburgh branch of a shop that sells new books, during which she underwent what I am led to believe is known as ‘training’. This appears to be a form of toxic brainwashing in which the victim is taught to believe all manner of nonsense, including the appalling mantra that ‘the customer is always right’. She’s polite and helpful, and irritatingly industrious – characteristics that just don’t cut it in a second-hand bookshop. Her principal redeeming feature is a brilliantly witty retaliatory attitude which, if folklore is to be believed, is symptomatic of her mane of ginger hair. When I told her that I was looking for stories for this book, she told me about an incident that happened in a bookshop she was working in a few years ago.

  It was a busy Saturday afternoon in Edinburgh (apparently all Saturday afternoons were busy – I wish I could say the same of my business), and the shop was full of parents with children. The children’s section was designed to create a comfortable environment where they might read (unlike mine, which is possibly the coldest corner of the shop, and paved with dismally un-child-friendly stone slabs). According to Gillian’s account of the place, it became a haven to which parents brought their young for picnics.

  On this particular Saturday the shop was un usually busy with parents and children, and one family had disappeared into the cosy reading area. Pippa, the person in charge of that part of the shop, was tidying the children’s section and discovered two very young children (pre-school age) on their own. Not unreasonably, she expected that their parents had wandered off into another part of the shop, but after some considerable time there was still no sign of them, so she asked her fellow staff if anyone knew where their parents were, a question to which nobody appeared to know the answer. She sat and read to the abandoned children for some time while other bookshop employees scoured the shop in search of the errant parents with no success. Shortly before Pippa was considering calling the police, the parents appeared, excitedly clutching bags of shopping. They’d been to BHS, a fifteen-minute walk from the bookshop, and were apparently oblivious to the alarm that they’d caused, and seemed utterly perplexed by the fact that the staff in the bookshop weren’t trained babysitters, part of whose job was to free them up on a Saturday afternoon to go shopping.

  Type three

  SPECIES: PARENTES, GLORIAE CUPIDI (ASPIRATIONAL PARENTS)

  I can tell you without the slightest shadow of a doubt that four-year-old Tarquin does NOT want to read War and Peace. Not all parents who want their children to achieve a high level of literacy will try to force their development, but those who attempt to, inflict either precociousness or misery on them. Again, in fairness, it’s very rare to see, and most people are happy to let their children’s reading develop at their own pace. But while I know literally nothing about child psychology, it does seem that the happiest children who come into the shop are those who are allowed to choose what books they want to read. They do, and in most cases, their parents give them the money to pay for the books themselves. This is another thing that would be all too easy to sneer at, but in an increasingly cash-free world it’s a comforting thing to see that parents do this. I can only guess at the reasons, but I suspect that they’re threefold: one, to teach their children how to count; two, to teach them how to interact with strangers in a controlled situation; and three, to teach them the value of money.

  In the days when Nicky still worked in the shop, the most wonderfully eccentric member of staff I’ve ever been fortunate enough to have employed, and one of the kindest and strangest people I’ve ever met, we had a memorable encounter with a truly charming young family. The son – who was about seven years old – bought a copy of one of the Harry Potter books, I think (although my memory may well have failed me here), and as he was paying for it, Nicky asked him what he was currently reading. He replied, To Kill a Mockingbird. Nicky was visibly taken aback, and his mother shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘He chose it – we didn’t think it was suitable, but he insisted.’ He is obviously an exceptional child, and they were the least pushy parents I could ever have wished to meet. They don’t really fit into this type, but then they don’t really fit into any type. I hope to see them again.

  Ty
pe four

  SPECIES: FILII, LIBRORUM CUPIDI (BOOK-LOVING CHILDREN)

  This is the inverse of the above category. I recently saw a family walking past the shop: three children ranging in age from about four to ten. As they were passing, I heard all three children clamouring and begging their parents to let them come into the shop. The mother looked in and said, ‘We’re not going in there, it’s just a shop selling old books.’ The children were clearly upset, and it doesn’t trouble my conscience in the slightest to sincerely hope that their whinging continued as far as the sweet shop, and hopefully beyond. It happens in the shop, too, when non-reading parents are reluctantly dragged in by children who are keen readers. It’s hard, when you’re a voracious reader, to accept the fact that not everyone else is, but reality sometimes slaps you in the face when you witness parents dragging their children out of a bookshop, rather than into it.

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