Till total £243.40
20 customers
SATURDAY, 26 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Nicky was in today. I asked her if she knew what happened to the box of three Creme Eggs that my mother had given me for Easter and which had been behind the counter. She denied all knowledge of them at first, then told me that she’d had to give one to a ‘crying child who had tripped over a rug in the shop’. When I asked her if she’d eaten any of them, she replied, ‘Maybe just a wee nibble.’ The crying child was clearly her. She eventually confessed to eating them all, telling me, ‘I don’t know why. I dinnae even like Creme Eggs.’
A customer appeared at the counter at 10 a.m. and asked ‘Where are the children’s books?’ I pointed towards the children’s section and replied ‘They’re just through that door there.’ The customer turned 180 degrees from where I’d just pointed and aimed her finger towards the front door of the shop, through which she had – literally seconds earlier – entered the building, and said, ‘What, that door there?’
After lunch I drove to Moffat to view the library of a firm of solicitors that had closed a few years earlier. Probably forty boxes. Most were of little interest, so I just took the Session Court volumes, roughly 150 of them, in fairly standard legal bindings. I’ll sell them on eBay as a job lot. Bindings like these used to sell for about £300 a yard, so it will be interesting to see what these make. There are seven yards of them.
I returned to the shop to the unmistakable reek of Smelly Kelly’s Brut 33, but fortunately I missed him by a few minutes.
Till total £269.99
24 customers
MONDAY, 28 APRIL
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
Shortly after I opened the shop there was a telephone call about a book that a customer had ordered online. It arrived on Saturday, and she wasn’t happy about it because the last five pages were torn: ‘I’ve got a thing about books with torn pages, they give me the creeps. Can I return it?’ I reluctantly agreed to let her send it back for a refund.
At 4.30 p.m. a man with a moustache and a baseball cap asked, ‘You don’t sell books, do you?’ then laughed uproariously.
Till total £92.96
13 customers
TUESDAY, 29 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
The Maltese woman who had been in the shop in March (complaining that there were no second-hand bookshops in Malta) dropped in to introduce herself. Her name is Tracy, and she had been here back then for an interview in the Osprey Room with the RSPB, for the job of being their representative. There is a pair of ospreys that has returned to a nest just outside Wigtown for the past six years; the RSPB has a live video link to the nest in the County Buildings. She is here for the summer to work there, although quite what she is going to do is a subject of much speculation since there is no sign of the ospreys as yet this year.
Three customers, on entering the shop, complained that they couldn’t see anything in the shop because it was so bright outside and their eyes had not adjusted. This is far from unusual and often explained in a tone suggesting that I am personally responsible for the involuntary reflex of the customer’s irises.
I finished The Third Policeman during the afternoon, when the shop was quiet.
Till total £121.98
12 customers
WEDNESDAY, 30 APRIL
Online orders: 0
Books found: 0
Katie was in today. She spent most of the day pricing up fresh stock and putting it on the shelves.
I lit the stove in the shop for the last time until autumn sets in. From May to October it’s warm enough in the shop for the fire not to be necessary. Also the swallows, swifts and house martins arrive in May, and the martins nest in the log store. I don’t like to disturb them once they have started breeding.
No orders this morning, which usually means that there is a problem with Monsoon, so I emailed them and hopefully they will fix it.
A customer brought in a collection of books about Burma which he wanted to sell: probably fifty titles. He declined my offer of £85.
After lunch I drove to Dumfries to pick up Anna from the railway station – she is back for the Spring Festival and hates to miss out on anything that’s going on in Wigtown. I sometimes suspect that she misses the cat as much as she misses me, from the attention she lavishes upon him.
When we returned from Dumfries, we were met by a customer who asked if we stock old volumes of The Scots Magazine. On hearing that we do not, for some reason he took this as the signal to tell me – at considerable length – which issues he was looking for, and why.
Just before closing I checked the inbox and found an email from Rob Twigger telling me that he is coming up to visit tomorrow.
Till total £147.50
14 customers
MAY
It is not true that men do not read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel – the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel – seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories.
George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’
Despite the success of the television serialisation of The Forsyte Saga, the ‘Galsworthy-and-water’ type of books to which Orwell refers are entirely overlooked by today’s customers, and Jeffery Farnol, Dennis Wheatley, Warwick Deeping, O. Douglas, Baroness Orczy – so rapaciously consumed in their heyday – now only serve as resting places for dust and dead bluebottles. As regards women being greater fiction readers, Orwell’s gender stereotyping is still largely true today, although his assertion that only men ‘read … the novels it is possible to respect’ by today’s standards sounds – at the very least – anachronistic. My own taste must be unusual by his reckoning in that I prefer fiction (but not detective stories). Most non-fiction, unless it’s a passion (such as Galloway – I am currently reading Dane Love’s book The Galloway Highlands), seems be pretty hard work as far as I can see, but the immersive capacity of a good novel to transport you into a different world is unique to the written word.
On the whole (in my shop at least) the majority of fiction is still bought by women, while men rarely buy anything other than non-fiction, a trend borne out in a completely unscientific experiment carried out by the author Ian McEwan a few years ago in London. He decided to give away free copies of one of his books during a busy lunchtime. Almost all of those who showed appreciation were women, and those who responded with suspicion were nearly all men. This led McEwan to conclude in The Guardian that ‘When women stop reading, the novel will be dead’ – a sentiment with which Orwell might, up to a point, have agreed. It is hard to predict what customers will buy, although the number of men who head straight to the railway section is uncanny.
During the Wigtown Book Festival (which takes place over ten days at the end of September), it is always the non-fiction events that can be relied upon to draw the largest audiences. Poetry seems to be the one thing for which there is barely any audience at all – a sad fact that is reflected in the shop. Poetry contributes very little to the daily takings. Heaney, Hughes, Auden, Eliot, MacDiarmid, Wendy Cope and a smattering of others tick over, but the Tennysons, Cowpers, Brownings and Lowells sit heavily on the shelves, only occasionally disturbed by the hand of a curious customer. They are poetic fossils that perhaps one day will be unearthed and dusted off by literary paleontologists.
THURSDAY, 1 MAY
Online orders: 0
Books found: 0
No orders again today and still no word from Monsoon.
Nicky arrived at the shop dressed in her medieval tabard and a pair of trousers so yellow that they had the appearance of the yolk of an egg that has been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. She announced that she is going to supplement her income
by turning her van into a mobile DIY shop. She disappeared during her lunch break and turned up later with an enormous piece of fungus that she had cut from a tree near the Martyrs’ Stake, just at the bottom of Wigtown Hill, a hundred yards past the last house in the town. She has decided that it is edible and is most likely Chicken of the Woods. She spent much of the day trying to convince me to eat some. The only thing I’m convinced of is that she is trying to kill me.
Monsoon eventually replied to my email and logged on to our system remotely, and repaired whatever was blocking the orders.
In the middle of the afternoon, as Nicky and I were in the middle of an argument about evolution (we had just reached the usual ‘you might be a monkey but I’m not’ stage), Mr Deacon appeared. He had, apparently, lost his copy of A Gambling Man before he’d finished it and wanted to order another one. The evolution argument resumed as soon as he had left.
Till total £99.50
10 customers
FRIDAY, 2 MAY
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky was in again today. I opened the door to find Twigger waiting outside with his bag. I had forgotten to leave any doors open before I had gone to bed last night. He had slept in the garden. I apologised, to which he replied, ‘No problem, man. I like sleeping outside.’
Today was the first day of the Wigtown Spring Festival. This is a small series of events organised by the Association of Wigtown Booksellers. Without much of a budget for visiting speakers or for promotion, it is by necessity a small affair and barely generates a fraction of the footfall of the September festival, whose budget is now close to £400,000. Events in the Spring Festival take place in the shops and smaller venues which we can afford, and are usually attended by locals.
Nicky went back down the hill to cut more Chicken of the Woods. She fried it up in the kitchen. Twigger is running a book to see if she is still alive tomorrow.
Anna and I spent much of the day moving furniture in the drawing room in preparation for a Whisky Supper, which took place upstairs in the drawing room. Sixteen tickets sold. The catering was done by Maria, an Australian woman who moved to the area with her husband and children a few years ago. He is a teacher, and she set up a catering business. She is very enthusiastic. Everything, regardless of whether it is or is not, is ‘fantastic’. The meal was superb, as was the whisky which we all drank to excess.
Nicky spent the night in the festival bed and promised to open the shop in the morning so that I could lie in.
Till total £182.49
13 customers
SATURDAY, 3 MAY
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
There was no sound of activity from downstairs at 8.30 a.m., so I went down and opened the shop. Nicky was still fast asleep. Twigger, Nicky and I were all suffering this morning after last night’s Whisky Supper.
After lunch I drove to Dumfries with Anna to pick up her friend Lola. Lola works in the film industry and, like Anna, is an American living in London. She is a slight woman with dark hair, and very witty. Anna introduced her to her friend Diana, another American expat living in London, and also in the film business. Diana and Lola have started a production company and are keen to turn Anna’s book into a feature film. We stopped at Threave Castle on the way home. The castle is on an island in the middle of the River Dee, and access is via a small boat with an outboard motor. It was the seat of the ‘Black’ earls of Douglas and was built in the fourteenth century by a man who delighted in the name of Archibald the Grim, Lord of Galloway. It is an impressive fortification and was clearly designed as such, rather than as a luxurious home.
By the time we arrived home Alex (my brother-in-law) had arrived in preparation for his talk at 6 p.m. on building a new whisky distillery. Alex works for a company called Adelphi. When the business started, their strategy was to buy up casks of rare malts from distilleries, bottle it and sell it under their own label. His boss decided, though, that it would be worth producing their own whisky, so they’ve built a distillery in Ardnamurchan, the most westerly point on the British mainland. For someone who appears quite shy, Alex’s talk was superb. In fact, by any standards it was extremely good, made even better by the frequent samples of whisky that he liberally handed out.
Till total £417.57
28 customers
SUNDAY, 4 MAY
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
When I attempted to open the shop at 11 a.m. (Twigger had a talk upstairs at noon), I discovered that the lock was jammed and the door wouldn’t open, so we hastily made signs directing people to the side door and I drove to Newton Stewart and bought a replacement mortice lock. Much of the afternoon was spent attempting to get the door open without breaking it, so that I could put the new lock in. Not the most professional or productive day of the Spring Festival, although Twigger’s talk was excellent and well attended. Anna introduced him and thanked him.
Anna and Lola spent the sunny spring day wandering about the town, Anna clearly happy to show Lola her beloved places in and around Wigtown, like an overexcited tour guide. Anna has embraced Wigtown life and befriended far more people than I would ever have anticipated, being blessed with a complete lack of shyness. One of her favourite locals was a man who used to zoom about on a mobility scooter with a number plate bearing his name, ‘Gibby’. When he died two years ago, she was distraught. She has so immersed herself in the community that – as with most people in Wigtown – crossing the street can take twenty minutes, depending on who you bump into on the way.
Started reading Twigger’s book, Angry White Pyjamas, which, despite having known him for some years, I had never got round to reading.
Till total £128.50
13 customers
MONDAY, 5 MAY
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Bank holiday.
Nicky worked today so that Anna and I could entertain Lola. We had lunch at Margie’s, then the three of us (Anna, Lola and me) cooked a leg of lamb for ten friends for supper. Margie is a Cambridge academic who bought a house in Wigtown a couple of years ago. She is Dutch and has two daughters, who are leaders in their respective scientific fields. She lived in Galloway when the girls were children, then moved to Cambridge. She’s back – in part – because of Anna’s book. Margie is one of Wigtown’s biggest assets: hugely intelligent, funny, irreverent and generous to a fault.
Tracy called in at lunchtime to tell me that she had seen a few swallows during her lunch break. Spring has arrived.
Twigger left at 10 a.m. and headed back to Dorset.
Another late night, fuelled by red wine and the leftover whisky from Alex’s talk on Saturday.
Till total £106.99
13 customers
TUESDAY, 6 MAY
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Norrie covered the shop because Nicky spends her Tuesdays doorstepping people and telling them about Jesus. I drove to Dumfries – Anna and Lola wanted to go to the auction. Anna came away with two boxes of rubbish, which is her usual haul. I had a long chat with Angus the submariner about the conspicuous absence of Dave the Hat, who never misses a sale. We speculated wildly about what might have happened to him. The three of us spent the day eating and wandering about the town, including a trip to Caerlaverock Castle, then dropped Lola at the railway station at 5 p.m. and came home.
Among the usual bills and demands for money in the mail was Mr Deacon’s book.
Till total £120.50
13 customers
WEDNESDAY, 7 MAY
Online orders: 8
Books found: 7
At lunchtime I left a message on Mr Deacon’s phone to say that he could collect his book any time.
Till total £140.01
18 customers
THURSDAY, 8 MAY
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
A friendly, chatty customer told me that he has to dispose
of his uncle’s maritime history book collection, which is in his flat in the West End of Glasgow. I’ll go up next week to look at it.
Mr Deacon arrived to collect his book at about 3 p.m. As he was leaving, I noticed that he was missing his left shoe.
Till total £180.83
19 customers
FRIDAY, 9 MAY
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
A customer was waiting at the door with two boxes of books when I opened the shop this morning, all Penguins, and mostly green crime editions, which are by far the most sellable. Nicky appeared ten minutes after I had bought them for £60 and asked me how much I had paid for them. I asked her to guess, so she rifled through them and said £20.
Foodie Friday’s treat this week was an out-of-date Mr Kipling’s Battenberg cake from the Morrisons skip. We spent the day pricing up the Penguins and putting them on the shelves and arguing about what consideration we should give to Amazon prices when we are deciding how much to sell something for in the shop. Nicky is all for being cheaper than Amazon, but I believe that most customers understand that our prices can’t always undercut the lowest on Amazon because of our overheads.
The Diary of a Bookseller Page 9