The Diary of a Bookseller
Page 8
Till total £239.37
33 customers
TUESDAY, 8 APRIL
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
At 10.15 a.m. a woman walked in and roared, ‘I am in my element! Books!’, then continued to shout questions at me for an hour while she waddled about the shop like a ‘stately goose’, as Gogol describes Sobakevich’s wife in Dead Souls. Predictably, she didn’t buy anything.
Andrew arrived at 11 a.m. and worked until noon. He managed to finish the Cs in the crime section.
Just as I came downstairs from making a cup of tea, a man came to the counter with a copper bracelet from the table of antiques in the shop and asked, ‘C’est combien?’ Quite why he chose to speak in French I have no idea. He wasn’t even French; he was Scottish.
Eliot arrived at 4 p.m., and promptly removed his shoes. Within five minutes I had tripped on them twice.
Four customers commented on how fat Captain has become.
The shop was bustling all day, but I managed to finish Dead Souls despite this.
Till total £451.41
33 customers
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL
Online orders: 1
Books found: 1
Unusually, Nicky was at work on time today; she’s occasionally ten minutes early but normally fifteen minutes late. She arrived clutching her hairbrush and toothbrush and ran upstairs to smarten herself up. She looked exactly the same when she came down. When I asked her why she was in such a flap, she replied, ‘Dinnae try to eat cold stir-fry when you’re driving. I went over a bump and most of it ended up going up my sleeves and down my cleavage.’
She dodged off for lunch just as an American family came in. Three generations. The grandfather came to the counter with three books, slammed them down and barked, ‘Here, lad’ at me, then thrust his credit card at the machine and followed with, ‘You people take credit cards, don’t you?’ while his grandchildren charged about the shop making chaos as their father shouted at them. He came to the counter with an eighteenth-century four-volume history of Scotland, priced at £100, and asked where our section on Badenoch was. When I told him that we don’t have a specific section on Badenoch, he ploughed on, telling me that that was where his family was from, as though this was somehow better than being from any other place. The sense of peace when they left was practically palpable but, in their defence, they bought the £100 set. They are redeemed.
Often, even after you’ve told customers that you do not have a copy of the book they’re looking for in stock, they will insist on telling you at great length and in tedious detail why they’re looking for that particular title. A few possible explanations for this have occurred to me, but the one by which I am most convinced is that it is an exercise in intellectual masturbation. They want you to know that this is a subject about which they are informed, and even if they are wrong about whatever they’ve chosen to pontificate on, they drone on – normally at a volume calculated to reach not only the cornered bookseller but everyone else in the vicinity too.
Finn, Anna and I were having a meeting in the kitchen when Eliot burst in, talking loudly on his phone. Rather than apologise for the intrusion, he kicked off his shoes and carried on talking. Eventually we moved into the drawing room, unable to compete with the volume of the one half of Eliot’s conversation that he was sharing with us.
Nicky stayed the night. Eliot had offered to buy supper at the pub, so I grabbed Nicky and we headed over. We had a couple of pints then came back. Nicky went straight to bed in the festival bed, while Eliot and I clattered about upstairs, just a few feet above her head.
Till total £537
24 customers
THURSDAY, 10 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Awoke at 7 a.m. to the symphonic chaos of Eliot stomping, stamping and crashing around having baths, cups of tea, packing etc. before he finally left at 7.30 a.m. Shortly after that I heard Nicky stirring downstairs, making a tiny fraction of the noise that Eliot had, doing exactly the same things.
Nicky suggested that we make small posters asking customers to read a passage from their favourite book to us on film in the shop, to which I reluctantly agreed, then forced Carol-Ann to do one. Nicky chose for her a book aimed at eleven-year-olds from the children’s section. She looked deeply offended but read a bit anyway.
Till total £424
31 customers
FRIDAY, 11 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Foodie Friday. Today Nicky brought in two egg custard tarts that she had pillaged from the skip. She had accidentally sat on one of them in her van.
At 11 a. m., as I came downstairs from making a cup of tea, a customer in socks and sandals accosted me and said, ‘I want to talk to you about the price of your copy of The Busconductor Hines. It says it is £65. Surely that can’t be right.’ So I checked online, and ours was indeed the cheapest first edition in a mint jacket available. He tutted and eventually came to the counter with a paperback edition of it priced at £2.50. Last week a similar thing happened involving a copy of Iain M. Banks’s Feersum Endjinn.
During lunch I overheard a group of customers in their early twenties discussing the shop. One of them said it was the ‘coolest shop’ she’d ever been in. Presumably she was referring to the temperature.
As I was locking up the back of the shop, I noticed that there were several large rafts of frogspawn in the pond.
Till total £182.49
19 customers
SATURDAY, 12 APRIL
Online orders: 4
Books found: 2
Nicky turned up, as usual at this time of year, in her black ski suit. She looked as though she belonged in the freezer unit of an industrial butcher’s rather than a bookshop. This morning she told me that she ‘couldnae be bothered’ to process the orders on the Royal Mail system and that I could do it on Monday. I have given up the struggle with Nicky when it comes to this sort of thing. In the past, when I’ve asked her to do things, she has nodded enthusiastically then completely ignored what I have said and proceeded to do whatever she feels like doing. She is reliable and industrious, though, and exceptionally entertaining. And she loves the shop and does whatever she can to improve the stock and make the business work better. It is just slightly unfortunate that we have different opinions about what those things are.
The wind today was a cold easterly, so I lit the fire at 10 a.m. Plenty of customers. As I was walking through the shop putting fresh stock on the shelves, I spotted three young boys quietly reading on the festival bed. I normally discourage customers from going onto the festival bed, largely because it is usually children who treat it as a play area and mess it up, after which I have to go up and tidy it. There’s a rope across the access, but these boys must have crawled under it. It would have taken a heart of stone to tell them to move, as they sat there, quietly engrossed.
This evening I started reading the copy of The Third Policeman that an old girlfriend gave to me years ago and I hadn’t got round to reading.
Till total £479.97
36 customers
MONDAY, 14 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
The last customer of the day was a young Italian woman who bought a two-volume edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, dated 1679, which had been on the shelves for at least ten years. It was the only decent thing to come from the contents of a flat above a near-derelict Italian café in New Cumnock, which had belonged to an old woman who had died a few months before we were asked to clear the books by one of the executors of her estate.
I drove there on a dark, sleeting Monday night back in January 2003 after I had shut the shop, and met the woman who had been charged with the thankless task of disposing of the contents of the flat. The place was in a dreadful state; the roof was leaking badly, the floral wallpaper was peeling, bare bulbs clung to cobweb-covered cables from ceilings of exposed lath a
nd crumbling plaster. There was no evidence of anything having been cleaned for years. It had clearly been inhabited by an elderly spinster; all the bedding was pink and covered with cat hair. There were probably two thousand books, all damp and thick with cat hair too, and – with the exception of the Decameron – every one of them was from The Book Club, a publisher that most booksellers avoid at all costs (the market for them is almost non-existent). While I was searching for something that might have made the trip worthwhile among the damp dross, the woman who met us explained that the last occupant had been the only daughter of an Italian immigrant who had come to Scotland in the 1920s. He had met and married a Scottish woman, and they had opened a café in an empty property below the flat. It had rapidly become the busiest place in the town, bustling and thriving.
The executor found a dusty chest of drawers, pulled one of them open and extracted a yellowed photograph album which contained hundreds of black-and-white photographs of the place in its heyday – full of smiling people, every table full, people dancing. When the Italian man died, a few years after his wife in the 1970s, he had handed on the business to his only child, his daughter, but times had changed and the business declined and eventually closed. Downstairs the big glass windows were boarded up, and the place – once busy – was as silent as the grave, save for the sound of the rain coming through the roof and dripping onto the floor. The optimism of that young Italian man, with his Scottish wife, his thriving business and his young daughter, the courage it took him to move to another country, learn a new language and start a business and a new life could never have anticipated the sad end that fate dealt to his dream. I am quite sure that the two-volume Decameron would have been among the few possessions he brought with him from Italy, and I wonder how long it might have been passed down through his family, only to end that inheritance here in a damp flat in New Cumnock with nobody to pass it on to. But now it will have a new life in the hands of the young woman who bought it today, and who knows what the next few hundred years will have in store for it?
Till total £248.28
21 customers
TUESDAY, 15 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Sandy the tattooed pagan dropped in to see if our stick supply needs to be topped up. We haven’t sold one for at least a month.
Telephone call from the council telling me that Andrew won’t be coming in any more as he found the experience too exhausting. I was growing to like him.
Mr Deacon dropped in at 4.20 p.m. to order a copy of Jenny Uglow’s A Gambling Man, a copy of which I had, by chance, put on the shelves earlier in the day. He was as delighted as he allows himself to become in company.
Till total £179.99
12 customers
WEDNESDAY, 16 APRIL
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
Two very sweet ginger-haired girls came in this morning and asked if this was Captain’s shop. They must be locals, or perhaps they follow the shop on Facebook. Captain’s fame has clearly spread wider than I had thought. While we were chatting about how fat Captain has become recently, a man in an extremely tight pair of shorts came to the counter and bought a book called The Book of Successful Fireplaces.
In the early afternoon a man who was probably about my age came in and kicked off his shoes, and left them by the door. I suppose I am not really in a position to criticise; quite often I wander about the place barefoot during the summer, but I am not sure if I would do it in anyone else’s shop.
Till total £340.35
35 customers
THURSDAY, 17 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky arrived in her summer ensemble, her ski suit now consigned to the winter wardrobe until November. Today’s outfit comprised a long skirt made from some sort of nettle fibre, and a home-made paisley shirt with a brown tunic (again home-made). She could easily pass for an extra from a low-budget adaptation of Robin Hood.
One of the books ordered today was for The Female Instructor, an early Victorian ‘guide to domestic happiness’. In today’s context it reads more like a guide to domestic abuse.
In the afternoon a customer asked if he could be videoed reading from his favourite book, so I set up the tripod and sat him by the fire. His reading was beautiful; he chose to read from Cold Comfort Farm, and read it in a lyrical Welsh accent. After he’d finished I was chatting to him and his wife and asked what they were doing in the area. She told me that they were on their way to Larne, to which I replied, ‘Why? It’s an awful place.’ Larne, apparently, is where they live.
Till total £319.70
30 customers
FRIDAY, 18 APRIL
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
Good Friday.
Katie was working in the shop today as Nicky was off doing Jehovah’s Witness things. Katie is a medical student who has worked in the shop for several summers and lacks any respect for me whatsoever. She moved here with her mother and sister from Oxford when she was a child.
A customer came to the counter and said, ‘I’ve looked under the W section of the fiction and I can’t find anything by Rider Haggard.’ I suggested that he had a look under the H section.
Till total £197.89
18 customers
SATURDAY, 19 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Katie was in again today, covering for Nicky, so I asked her to package the books for the Random Book Club (which now has 163 members) and deal with the Royal Mail account for them. When I went to the post office to ask Wilma if the postman could pick them up, she told me that he could do it on Tuesday (Easter Monday = Bank Holiday).
As the shop was about to close, there was a telephone call from Mrs Phillips (‘I am ninety-three and blind, you know’), who couldn’t remember the title of Mrs Gaskell’s first novel and wanted to know if I could tell her.
Till total £250.49
17 customers
MONDAY, 21 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
The first customer brought in a book covered in bubble wrap and tissue paper. It was a theological work in Latin, dated 1716. He asked for a valuation, so I suggested that about £40 would probably a reasonable price for it, at which point he told me (indignantly) that Bonhams had valued it at £50.
One of the orders today was for a book called Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants.
Till total £162.43
18 customers
TUESDAY, 22 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Telephone call at 11 a.m. from someone who asked ‘How do you go about doing book readings in your shop?’ Further scrutiny revealed that his genre is fantasy and that he wants to read from his latest book, which is about mermaids – ‘It’s set in the sea.’ It is hard to imagine where else it could be set.
At 2 p.m. a customer came to the counter with a beautifully illustrated book on salmon fishing from the 1920s which he had found in the Garden Room. It was unpriced. He asked how much it was, and – feeling generous – I said, ‘You can have it for £2.50.’ He walked out muttering, ‘I’ll get it for less on Amazon.’ So I checked the book shortly afterwards and found that the cheapest Amazon copy is £22. It is now priced at £12 in the shop, but I doubt he will be back.
As I was about to close the shop, there was a telephone call from a woman in Moffat who has a legal library to sell. I tend to avoid these as they are not easy to sell on, but you never know what else you might find among them, so I arranged to go and view the collection on Saturday.
The postman picked up the seven sacks of parcels for the Random Book Club at 4.30 p.m.
Till total £286.49
22 customers
WEDNESDAY, 23 APRIL
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
A man smelling of TCP was the only customer in the
shop for the first hour of opening, during which time I attempted to put out fresh stock. He had an uncanny ability to be standing in front of every shelf to which I needed access, regardless of the subject or where in the shop the relevant shelves were.
Till total £233.48
19 customers
THURSDAY, 24 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky was in today so that she can take tomorrow off. She decided to eat her breakfast in the shop instead of her van. Normally she devours it while she is driving in to work, which inevitably results in most of it covering her hessian skirt and Robin Hood tabard.
An elderly customer told me that her book club’s next book was Dracula, but she couldn’t remember what he’d written.
I noticed that two of the three Creme Eggs my mother gave me were missing.
Till total £160.70
14 customers
FRIDAY, 25 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
No Nicky today, so no revolting gourmet delights from the Morrisons skip.
After lunch a customer brought in four boxes of books: ‘You’ll love these, they’re all best-sellers.’ I picked out a few books and offered him £5. He looked horrified and announced that he would rather give them to the charity shop, where – he confidently assured me – ‘they appreciate quality’.
The phenomenon of the best-seller in the publishing industry does not seem to translate into the same financial cash cow in the second-hand book industry. Perhaps people who buy into the bestseller concept will always buy their books new, to be on the crest of the wave as it breaks rather than the troughs behind it. Perhaps also because the Dan Browns and Tom Clancys of this world are published in such vast quantities that there is never any scarcity value in them for the dealer or the collector. What passes for a best-seller in the new book market is precisely the sort of book that will be a dog in the second-hand trade. Customers often fail to understand this and think that their first edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is worth a fortune, when in fact 12 million of them were printed. As an author’s success and fame increase, so too will the size of the print runs of their successive books. Hence a first edition of Casino Royale (of which only 4,728 first edition hardbacks were printed) will be worth considerably more than a copy of The Man with the Golden Gun, which had a first-edition, first-issue print run of 82,000.