Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

by Shaun Bythell

  Occasionally there will be a hummer and a whistler in the shop at the same time, and while the optimist would hope that these two forces might cancel each other out, sadly it appears that the opposite is true: from being two small, mildly irritating sound waves they combine to form a single, devastating tsunami of aural horror.

  Type four

  SPECIES: CREPANS (FARTER)

  This can be a silent type, and more often than not, it is. In a way, there’s something slightly more noble about an audible farter, though. They appear at least to have the courage of their colonic convictions. The farter usually has the manners to find a quiet, unoccupied corner of the shop in which to commit their foul offence, but occasionally – whether out of necessity or malice I don’t know – they will let fire at the counter. Quite often, when I’m walking through the shop putting books on the shelves, I’ll encounter a pocket of someone’s freshly expelled exhaust fumes. Normally it’s pretty easy to identify the culprit, but not always. If you can see anyone hurriedly scuttling away you can be reasonably confident that they are responsible.

  Recently, while I was behind the counter in the shop, checking the values of some books which I’d bought from a house near Girvan, I noticed a distinctly sulphurous whiff about the air. There was only one other person in the shop, an elderly man wearing fawn slacks pulled up just below his chest and a pair of brown Crocs. He was slowly walking away from me, a benign smile on his face. We both knew that he was the culprit, but from his grin I suspect that he was brimming with pride, rather than feigning remorse. A part of me wanted to salute him for his audacity.

  Type five

  SPECIES: REPROBANS (TUTTER)

  Perhaps the most unwelcome in the shop of all the types described in this book is the tutter. It is almost as if you can double the obnoxiousness of any of the other types by discovering that – along with their other manifest flaws – they are also a tutter. The tutter emerged from the womb with an immediate air of disapproval and opprobrium. Had they been capable of speech following their genesis, they would unquestionably have had ‘words’ with the obstetrician, the nurses, the midwife and the cleaners in the hospital. And probably with the architect and builders too. Nothing is good enough for the tutter, and they manifest this through an almost incessant shaking of the head and disapproving clucking sound. It is like a mating call, but the call of a creature with which no creature of sound mind would wish to mate. Like some species of expert, they are actively seeking disappointment. They have no interest whatsoever in telling their friends (all of whom are fellow tutters) about good service, a nice meal or a clean toilet. On the contrary. Without a litany of things to complain about, the tutter has no conversation. I like to think that I provide a service for the tutter in my bookshop, by telling them that we don’t have a copy of whatever it is they are looking for (even if we do) or by studiously ignoring their request for help until the third ‘Excuse me!’ is barked with such indignation that it could be heard from the other side of the street. Prices, too, provide great fodder for tutters. Everything – no matter how cheap – is ‘a rip-off’. Politically, the tutter is conservative, and is convinced that the Daily Mail has wandered a bit far to the left.

  There is literally nothing you can do to satisfy a tutter, other than to disappoint them. Not only is it extremely easy; it’s also tremendously good fun. On the rare occasions when they come to the shop with books to sell (they don’t tend to be great readers) they will always refuse your offer – no matter how generous – and storm out of the shop with a furious ‘I’d rather give them to a charity shop than accept that’. Which, in a nutshell, typifies the tutter: a person so convinced that the world is conspiring against them that they would rather receive literally nothing for their almost worthless Jeffrey Archer collection than the £20 you’ve offered them out of a misguided sense of pity.

  7

  Genus: Parentum historiae studiosus (Family Historian)

  I’m firmly of the conviction that, since we are all descended from a common ancestor, family history is really not that interesting, or important. So what if your great-grandfather was shot in the arse by a stray bullet at Ypres? If he’d discovered a cure for Weil’s disease, or worked out the solution to Fermat’s last theorem, then history would make sure of his place in it. The truth is that most of us live pretty unremarkable lives, and while it’s nice to think that your progenitors did great things, they probably didn’t. There is really nothing to be proud of in having a family tree. There’s far more to be proud of if you’ve actually planted a tree.

  From my experience in the shop, people who study their family history are usually doing so to make a point, and it’s usually a fairly petty one. But ten generations is 300 years. Someone, during those three centuries, has had an affair with a butler or a maid. Someone has pissed in your gene pool, however pure you believe your lineage is.

  Type one

  SPECIES: HOMINES MUNDI NOVI (AMERICANS)

  Despite the irritating fact that their ancestors emigrated from somewhere in rural Scotland to somewhere in rural America four generations ago, these people remarkably still consider themselves to be Scottish. Or worse still, ‘Scotch’. There is often a high-handedness about their request when they visit the shop – ‘Where do you keep your collection of books about the (insert any Scottish name) clan?’ – as though thousands of books have been written about their family, who survived on the buried, rotting corpses of gannets in St Kilda or some other far-flung outcrop of Scotland for dozens of genetically-challenged generations. Not that this isn’t fascinating – I’m mildly obsessed with the fact that anyone could have lived on that spiky rock, which appears to have been thrown into the middle of the Atlantic by a cruel deity for no other purpose than to torture its residents. But, were it part of my family history, I suspect that I would be quick to plant my roots in the new soil, rather than cling to the barren earth of the past.

  The huge majority of these customers are not from St Kilda, though, but descended from disenfranchised families driven across the sea by necessity following the Clearances, both Highland and Lowland (my friend Andrew Cassell wrote a superb book about the much-overlooked latter). I’m fairly sure that what they’re really looking for is some sort of evidence that they are in fact the clan chief, and that a damp ruin in Argyll is their birthright, when in fact it is manifestly obvious that their great-great-great-grandfather’s status in the clan was not that of the laird but rather that of the laird’s latrine cleaner. It is touching, though, that they feel so passionately connected to the land that spawned an ancestor from five generations back. A land whose owners treated them so badly that, when faced with a choice between sticking with what they knew or taking a perilous journey across the Atlantic into an unknown world, they chose the latter.

  Type two

  SPECIES: THERE IS NO TYPE TWO

  After careful consideration in the bath tonight, I’ve realised that nobody really cares a great deal for family history, other than Americans. I’m not entirely sure why this is. Occasionally Australians or New Zealanders will make a vague inquiry, but on the whole it is American customers who seem to be obsessed by this. I don’t really know why. It’s not as though there’s anything wrong with identifying as being American, although perhaps in a land of immigrants the only way to differentiate yourself is to cling on to a piece of the land you left, even if it is several generations behind you. As someone with an Irish mother and English father I feel slightly stateless, and as such probably identify more than I ought to with the land of my birth: Scotland. It’s far simpler to answer the question ‘Where are you from?’ with a single word than to embark on a lengthy (and dull) explanation of your genealogy. Perhaps it would be easier if everyone, when asked that question, replied ‘The Great Rift Valley’.

  Bonus

  Clearly Linnaeus had a considerably better grasp of his system of classification than I have, as mine has failed me remarkably. I had intended to slip this genus in earlier, but �
�� as with most elements of the way in which I conduct my business – an entirely predictable element of disorganisation has crept in, and I’m now forced to shoehorn this final chapter in under the transparently obvious pretence that it is an ‘added extra’. Perhaps we ought to have called the book Eight Types of People You Find in Bookshops, but it’s all a bit too late now – the press release has gone out – so what follows is a fudge in which I hope you’ll indulge me, with my apologies.

  8

  Genus: Operarii (Staff)

  Of all the types covered in this book, the only one you can guarantee will always be in a book-shop is staff. They are the interface, the front line and the foot soldiers of the industry – and they suffer for it. Everyone has an interest in which they possess an above-average amount of knowledge, but customers tend to expect that – because you work in a bookshop – you should know as much as they do about, for example, the life of William Makepeace Thackeray. An eighteen-year-old medical student who works part-time in Waterstones could not reasonably be expected to know that Thackeray’s wife – suffering from depression – attempted to take her own life by jumping from a ferry on a journey between Anglesey and Dún Laoghaire but failed in her efforts because her crinoline skirt acted like a balloon and left her floating in the Irish Sea while the vessel turned around to rescue her. Nonetheless, the Thackeray expert will delight in exposing her ignorance, despite knowing considerably less than she about, for example, the endocrine function of the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.

  I should qualify this by pointing out that the first three types in this category are mainly found only in shops selling new books. Sadly, the world of second-hand books is largely populated by people who own and run their own businesses and – with a few exceptions – can’t afford the luxury of staff. Student Hugo is possibly the only exception to this rule, and – like the Colossus of Rhodes – bestrides the two sides of the business, thankfully (mostly) not naked, and never urinating into the Aegean Sea.

  Type one

  SPECIES: DISCIPULUS HUGO (STUDENT HUGO)

  Student Hugo is the bookshop owner’s father’s aunt’s cousin (or something), and is in his final year at university. His branch of the family has done remarkably better than the owner of the bookshop’s line, but some sadist among them – a bored parent or vindictive godmother – has decided that spending a summer working in a bookshop would teach young Hugo a valuable lesson. The lesson being, presumably, that working in a bookshop is a singularly terrible idea. Nobody on the bookshop owner’s side of the family quite knows who Hugo is, but there’s some sort of genetic connection which, on meeting him, the owner of the bookshop will inevitably be considerably less than delighted to discover. He never stops grinning, thinks that Toulouse-Lautrec is a French rugby club and is the eldest son of a pantalon rouge. Following his six-month sojourn in the bookshop (during which he will have comprehensively failed to endear himself to a single other member of the staff, and proved to be of absolutely no help to even a solitary customer), he will be fast-tracked to a position in Lloyd’s of London due entirely to the fact that Great Aunt Spanky (real name Anne) has considerable influence. Once there, he will spend the rest of his working life lazily making appalling financial decisions with other people’s money, for which he will be richly rewarded. At university, he is doing his finals in Grouse Studies following the advice of Uncle Pongo (real name Rupert), who told him to pick the course with the fewest hours, which, by an entirely unsurprising coincidence, was also the course that required the most pitiful A-level results. Despite all of this, student Hugo is an affable type: kind and generous too. If you want to hear the most accurate portrayal of student Hugo, you can do no better than to listen to Marcus Brigstocke’s superb radio series Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Goes Off.

  Type two

  SPECIES: DISCIPULA MARIA (STUDENT MARY)

  Student Mary is also in the shop during breaks from university, the difference being that she is there because she needs the money and is passionate about literature. Unlike student Hugo, she will be able to answer almost any customer’s question. Student Mary’s passion for the written word has led her to embark on an ill-advised MA in literature, focusing on ‘The Impact of Male Death on William Faulkner’s Female Characters, 1929 to 1936’ or something similar, thus ensuring that her academic excellence will never translate into a lucrative career. While student Hugo’s mind is rarely troubled by even the smallest cirrostratus cloud of original thought, and is consequently incapable of contemplating the notion of failure (despite an overwhelming body of evidence), student Mary’s is a dense fog of self-doubt and lack of confidence. As a consequence, in spite of her vastly superior intellect, she always skulks in student Hugo’s shadow, spending her days in the back room, sorting through boxes of books and avoiding the public wherever possible, while student Hugo is front-of-shop boring trapped customers about the demise of the grouse populations of Dartmoor. Despite her shyness, student Mary is not unhelpful, but will only share her knowledge if repeatedly asked to do so by a customer, and even then with meek embarrassment.

  Type three

  SPECIES: STULTUS CUM BARBA (HIPSTER)

  These abominable creatures have only one redeeming feature, and that is that they believe that books are cool, in the same way that they believe that vinyl, tweed and beards are cool. Which, of course, they are, but because they always have been rather cool, and not because they have become the sartorial essentials of a pseudo-nerdy countercultural uniform. I’m reluctant to credit the hipster with anything else, because they’re deeply irritating in almost every other way, and have jumped on a bandwagon which makes even goths look like they’re outlandishly individual. They’re easily identified in the outside world because they can usually be seen in a café reading Baudelaire (a tattered, second-hand paperback copy which gives the illusion both that they’re re-reading it and that they are impoverished intellectuals) through a thick pair of 1970s NHS glasses which they bought for £200 from some bloke in a market stall in Camden who told them that they’d been worn by Tom Lehrer during his live performance of ‘The Elements’ in Copenhagen in 1967. But the hipster never turns the page because they’re not actually reading the book. Rather, it is – like their beard, their glasses, and their pipe – something to be seen with.

  In the bookshop where they work, the hipster is the diametric opposite of student Mary – they are there to be visible and aloof, unhelpful and resentful of any interruption to their vital work of feigning a look of melancholy while staring into the middle distance over an open book and stroking their beard. Any interruption to this process by a customer will result in a four-second pause, followed by a slow turn (and tilt) of the head, a sneer down their nose over the top of Tom Lehrer’s glasses and a supercilious ‘Hmmm?’, all of which are calculated to put the customer at such unease that they’ll apologise immediately and leave the hipster to shoot one final look of disapproval on the basis that this customer may have eaten meat at some point in the past ten years.

  Type four

  SPECIES: VENDITOR LIBRORUM ANTIQUORUM (SECONDHAND BOOKSELLER)

  Ancient, crumbling and often drunk or hungover, the second-hand bookseller is self-employed for no other reason than that they have no choice. Nobody in their right mind would ever give a job to someone so completely devoid of the most rudimentary social skills that even a Neanderthal outcast would look like Jay Gatsby in their company. They share several things in common with the hipster, but through accident rather than design. They wear tweed (but because it’s warm, rather than because it’s fashionable). They smoke pipes (because they’re proper smokers, rather than because it’s fashionable). They love real books (because they’re not connected to the internet, rather than because it’s fashionable), and they exude a complete contempt for their customers (because it’s an inevitable consequence of years of working in the trade, rather than because it is fashionable). The second-hand bookseller has been in the trade for so long that they can no longer reme
mber how they fell into it. Perhaps it was their first job, back in the days when there was a decent living to be made in selling old books, and before long they became so comfortable with the dusty surroundings of their environment and their kindly, aged employer, that when he offered to sell them the business they jumped at the opportunity. Nobody really knows. The late Sue Townsend, in her wonderful Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years, describes just such a character, Bernard Hopkins (although he is a member of staff rather than the benign owner, Mr Carlton-Hayes):

  Bernard Hopkins is the bookseller from hell. If he applies for a job at Waterstones his name triggers an alarm on their computer network. At one time Borders had a photograph of him up in their staff rooms with a notice saying: ‘Do not employ this man.’ But there is nobody to touch him when it comes to antiquarian books. He handles them with reverence and will not sell them to a careless owner – a bit like those women at Cats Protection who require you to have a degree in cat care before they will allow you to take one home.

  Bernard Hopkins is almost like a composite of every second-hand bookseller I’ve ever met, and his reticence in dealing with the book-buying public has nothing to do with a desire to look cool. If he’d ever had that wish, he would never have become a second-hand bookseller. Rather, it comes from nothing more than world-weariness. Once, he had enthusiasm for answering the questions of customers, but forty years of being asked – among others – the same twelve questions every day of every week, have reduced him to the belligerent wreck which he has become. Those twelve questions are as follows: