1 Do you get your books for free?
2 How many books do you have?
3 Have you read all of them?
4 Can you recommend a book for my wife? (Yes, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover)
5 Can you recommend a book for my husband? (Yes, The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene)
6 What’s the oldest book in the shop?
7 What’s the most expensive book in the shop?
8 Why is this book £6 when it was 2 shillings when it was first published?
9 Are you seriously asking £3 for this old book?
10 Do I get a bulk discount if I buy two books?
11 Can I bring my dog in? He’s very friendly. (The dog will immediately either urinate on the floor or start barking maniacally.)
12 Do you want to buy these books? (immediately thrusts an Iceland bag full of old copies of Take a Break magazine over the counter, almost knocking you out.)
Type five
SPECIES: DOMINUS (MANAGER)
Smartly dressed, clean, punctual, enthusiastic and armed with the inexplicable conviction that the customer is always right, the manager really has no place in a second-hand bookshop. Which is perhaps why you only ever find them in shops selling new books, and even then mainly in chains. The only exception to this extraordinary behaviour that I can think of is a story told to me by a friend who worked in a well-known Edinburgh bookshop when she was a student. My friend – a shop floor worker who was busy trying to put a Christmas window display together – had been dragged from her chore by an elderly twin-set-and-pearls Morningside woman who had demanded a copy of an out-of-print translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. After twenty minutes of trying to explain that it was no longer available as a new book, and that there was no way she could locate a copy, that she was busy and that there were other members of staff who could help her, the customer continued haughtily to demand it. My friend’s otherwise impossibly stoic patience snapped and she told the elderly customer, ‘Oh, why don’t you just fuck off!’ The horrified customer demanded to see the manager, and my trembling friend took her to the manager’s office on the top floor of the building, expecting the worst. As the lift doors opened, she looked nervously at the manager who – it later transpired – was in the middle of dealing with several missed orders, and a few absent staff, and was not in the best of moods. She introduced the elderly woman, and – in the almost certain expectation that she would never work in the shop again – told the manager that the woman had demanded to speak to him. The twin-set-and-pearls raised herself to her full height and said, ‘This wee lassie, one of your members of staff, has just told me to fuck off’. The manager, according to my friend, turned distractedly to her and said to the elderly woman – with impeccable politeness of tone – ‘Then why haven’t you fucked off ?’
Postscript
Genus: Cliens perfectus (Perfect Customer)
The perfect customer is, sadly, now almost a distant memory – someone for whom a day spent in a second-hand bookshop was a day well spent. Someone who understood that for the price of a pound of paper they could lose themselves in the worlds of the imaginations of H. Rider Haggard, George Eliot or Jane Austen – worlds that took the mind of a genius to create and in which they could immerse themselves and forget about their worries for a week, all for the cost of a cup of coffee. They’re mostly gone, now, replaced by the Amazon generation, for whom the chase has no thrill, and the pound of paper’s value is a penny.
When I bought the shop, the previous owner told me that things go in cycles: that twenty years before I took over there were voracious collectors of first editions of the best-known authors of their generation – J. B. Priestley, George Bernard Shaw, Jean Plaidy, Arnold Bennett. These, he assured me, had been his perfect customers, but he warned me that over the period of his tenure of the shop their numbers had dwindled, and that books which he could easily have expected to sell quickly for £20 were now gathering dust, untouched, priced at £4. But the nature of a cycle means that, as one generation dies off, another – hopefully – replaces it. And there are always authors who defy the limits of their age: Buchan, Stevenson, Ian Fleming, even Rider Haggard, still seem to sell well. It’s hard to know who among the great names of contemporary literature will slowly fade away from the appetites of collectors and who will stand the test of time. Of course, rare editions of all of these authors still appeal to collectors but those people are becoming fewer and farther between. In 200 years will Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and other giants of our age be elevated into literary immortality or almost forgotten? It’s impossible to know how kindly time will judge any of us. Will J. K. Rowling or Margaret Atwood become the Jane Austen of our times or end up as footnotes in a literary journal? Will Donna Tartt’s extraordinary, epic novels be read with the same reverence as Tolstoy, Homer and Hardy? Who knows whether the genius of Alan Bennett’s astute social observations will still be as relevant when viewed through the lens of a reader a century from now?
Type one
SPECIES: HOMO QUI LIBROS LITTERARIOS COLLIGIT (FICTION COLLECTOR)
So much fiction has been published over the years that our meagre stock of about 2,000 novels barely scratches the surface, so it’s extremely rare that we’ll have the book that the fiction collector is looking for. When we do, though, their delight is palpable. In most cases, it’s a title that they’ve spent a considerable number of years hunting down. They generally don’t use online search engines and have the dogged determination of the past generation of customers, for whom the internet wasn’t an option. It’s normally something scarce, or a specific edition, and there’s never any ‘negotiation’ on the price.
Type two
SPECIES: HOMO QUI LIBROS DE VIA FERRATA COLLIGIT (RAILWAY COLLECTOR)
Like others, this is a type whose existence I have praised in previous books. The railway collector is a species unlike all others, and whose passion is as fiery as their dress sense is bland. For them, the holy grail of literature is anything on the subject of the steam rolling stock of the LNER, or the collectable name-plates of the Victorian trains of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway. If you have what they’re looking for, they will treat you like a lord.
Type three
SPECIES: HOMINES NORMALES (NORMAL PEOPLE)
This is a type so rare that to categorise them as normal people seems somewhat of a misnomer. They don’t always know what they’re looking for and – as such – could easily fall into the monstrous regiment of vaguely curious time-wasters, but they’re different in as much as they know they want something for themselves but are sufficiently open-minded not to have a specific title in mind. They always leave the shop with something. And their most endearing quality is – like every other perfect customer – that they will happily pay the asking price without forcing you to engage in a mutually humiliating public argument about it.
Type four
SPECIES: DE SCIENTIA SCRIPTA FANATICUS (SCI-FI FAN)
I doubt whether there’s a single bookseller who will ever tell you that they have anything but the purest of love for the sci-fi fan. The same can be said of the graphic novel collector. Some of the giants of literature have contributed to the former genre: Doris Lessing, J. G. Ballard, H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Iain M. Banks, Ursula Le Guin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and P. D. James all tried their hands at it, and Douglas Adams too, to name but a handful. When I was in my teens, I was obsessed with Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, in which ice-nine, a government-manufactured chemical weapon, turns everyone (and everything) who touches it to ice. It seems strangely prescient as I write this and the virus has shut most of the planet down.
Over the years I’ve bought several sci-fi collections, all of which have flown from the shelves the moment the word gets round that they’re in the shop. Collectors know one another, and when I tell one of them that I’ve acquired a library, they flo
ck to the shop in their droves. Aside from the Asimov and Bradbury buyers, this type also attracts illustrator collectors. Sci-fi paperbacks (and they’re mostly first published in paperback) tend to have the most extraordinarily lurid and stylishly illustrated covers. I suspect that the publishers have insisted that the illustrators spend at least a week on a mind-bending daily dose of LSD before putting brush to paper in most, if not all, cases.
The sci-fi fan is instantly recognisable. To say that they are social misfits would be to do them a huge disservice. They fit in, but they only ever want to do so on their own terms, and in the comfort of their own community. They are a clan, and identify in the same way that pantalons rouges club together. As a bookseller, the joy of the sci-fi fan is that they’re never disappointed. Provided you have something in stock by Philip K. Dick, or anything with a cover illustration by Joseph Mugnaini, they will be delighted. There is a uniform, of course. It usually involves a T-shirt (black) with either a Star Wars or a Dr Who retro design. Shoes (trainers) are a mandatory white. Endearingly, the sci-fi fan is never alone: they always come in pairs, and usually as a charmingly – if tiresomely – infatuated couple. And always wearing identical clothes. Somehow they manage to pull off the seemingly impossible feat of being simultaneously less cool yet more cool than the hipster.
The graphic novel fan is cut from similar cloth, although of a marginally lighter shade of black. The graphic novel has in recent years risen from the gutter of literary criticism to be now deservedly squinting in surprise at the stars. In 2018 Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina was long-listed for the Booker Prize. Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman deserve equal, if not greater, recognition as works of literary excellence. The graphic novel fan is similar in appearance to the sci-fi fan, but is of a far more earnest disposition. It’s rare for me, when buying books, to come across graphic novels, but when I do, I usually find them in considerable numbers. And when buyers come in looking for them, they usually buy them in equally large quantities.
⋆
Without lovers of books, I would have no business, so I should conclude with an apology, and in words far more articulate than my own. Roy Harley Lewis ends his Antiquarian Books with this:
Most other enthusiasts, whether they are propagating religion, politics, or even sport, seem to be fired by a crusading spirit. But the lover of antiquarian books feels he has something in common with other bibliophiles. Crusaders are invariably thoroughly irritating, so forget about soapboxes. I am talking not even about a ‘soft sell’ but more about a discreet word here and a sharing of excitement there. A public more aware of antiquarian books can only stimulate the trade, and that is all anyone can ask.
Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops Page 7