The Diary of a Bookseller
Page 12
MONDAY, 9 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Awoke and opened the shop with the hangover from hell.
On Facebook today was a message from hater Paul: ‘We’ve crossed swords before and before you patronise me with your explanation of exactly what your site is meant to be portraying, remember that due to the wide coverage of the internet, you are possibly doing your business more damage than good. I, for one, stopped visiting your shop a few years ago, due to your pathetic postings on Facebook and over-inflated self-belief and attitude. I really think you should stop doing this, as it is quite patently a childishly backhanded way of being rude behind your customers’ backs. Grow up and find a more beneficial hobby for crying out loud.’
In the evening I went for a pint with Eliot and Natalie McIlroy, who is one of this year’s festival artists in residence. Natalie’s project is to find thirty-one Galloway pippins – apple trees native to this area – and create an indoor orchard in an empty building on the square. She is going to raffle them off at the end of the festival. I already have one in my garden. The fruit it produces is huge. This year there are three artists in residence – Natalie, a woman called Anupa Gardner, who paints on textiles, and Astrid Jaekel, who did an extraordinary silhouette installation in the windows of the County Buildings last year. This year Astrid is making plywood cut-outs of figures to go in front of each shop. Astrid is German but grew up in rural Ireland before moving back to Germany. She has a very unusual blend of accents.
Among the books from the Glasgow deal last week was a set of Scottish Mountaineering Club journals, which, with hindsight, I wish I had left behind. They are nearly impossible to sell, and the shelves in the Scottish climbing section are already bulging with them.
Till total £294
17 customers
TUESDAY, 10 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Today Laurie was in, and I spent most of the day in the garden, so my only interaction with a customer was during her lunch break at 12.30 p.m. The customer asked, ‘Do you have any pamphlets about the history of the area?’, to which I replied, ‘No, but we’ve got plenty of books about local history in the Scottish room. You’re welcome to have a look there.’ The customer parted – on the way out of the door – with ‘Oh no, we don’t want books. We’re only interested in free pamphlets.’
The garden behind the shop is long and narrow (50m by 7m) and would have been a vegetable garden for the house during its heyday in the late Georgian period. Consequently it has been fertilised with lime, and as such is not conducive to the growth of rhododendrons, magnolias, azaleas and other ericaceous plants, which I like to grow. There is a healthy looking camellia, which flowers in April, but the flowers turn brown within days and fall off shortly afterwards.
When I bought the place, the garden was mainly rock gardens and dwarf conifers, but over the years I have replanted all of it, and now in spring it is an explosion of colour and scent, with gardenia, scented clematis, wisteria, viburnum, laurel, all manner of ground cover, native trees and shrubs. With the help of pots and ericaceous compost there are even azaleas and rhododendrons. It is my favourite place, and at this time of year, when the days are long and warm, sitting out there alone at night is a singular pleasure. At dusk the bats appear, and it is a joy to sit on the bench with a glass of whisky watching them flitting, silhouetted against the fading light. Once, one came so close to me in pursuit of its prey that I could feel the breath of its wings against my face as it wheeled away. Older Gallovidians refer to them as ‘flittermice’, probably something that fans of operetta would recognise.
Till total £184.89
19 customers
WEDNESDAY, 11 JUNE
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Laurie was in to cover the shop today.
While she was having her lunch break, a customer started rummaging through a box of unpriced books and found a Penguin edition of The Day of the Triffids, priced in pencil at 12p (presumably from a charity shop in the 1970s). When I told her that our price would be £1.50, she decided that was ‘outrageous’ and that if that was the case she’d ‘just get it from the library’. I have a feeling that ‘outraged’ may well be her factory setting.
After lunch I drove to Dumfries and picked up Anna from the railway station at 4.30 p.m. Home by 5.45 p.m.
The swallows’ eggs have all hatched: three in one nest, and four in the other. Hopefully Captain will not annihilate them.
Till total £127.50
15 customers
THURSDAY, 12 JUNE
Online orders: 6
Books found: 5
Laurie was in the shop again. Today was a beautiful sunny day, and Anna was clearly delighted to be back in Galloway and away from London.
My father telephoned shortly after the shop opened to see if I wanted to go fishing, so much of the morning was spent with him in a boat, trout-fishing on Elrig Loch. We caught six or seven wild brown trout. Elrig is a loch about six miles from Wigtown. Gavin Maxwell spent his childhood nearby and wrote about it in The House of Elrig. The house is now owned by a family called Korner, who left Europe in the 1930s, when the Nazi menace was starting to loom large. They took in the Austrian ‘degenerate’ artist Oskar Kokoschka during the Second World War, after he fled Europe in 1938. Stories abound locally of Kokoschka giving framed sketches to local farmers and other people who had shown him kindness, and of the recipients – unable to comprehend the artist’s modern genius – politely accepting them, then throwing the sketches in the waste-paper basket and putting photographs in the frames instead.
My father and I often fish together, and drifting down the banks of Elrig on a warm day, with a good ripple on the water, is nirvana. When there is enough water, we go salmon-fishing on the nearby River Luce, a river that I have fished since early childhood with him. During the season we both become acutely aware of the weather: if it is warm enough to go to Elrig and there is a bit of cloud cover (not too bright) and a good enough breeze, we will meet at the boathouse and fish for trout. If there has been enough rain to push the Luce up over a foot, we will meet on the banks of the river instead and fish for salmon. The river always takes precedence over the loch if conditions are right for both.
My father first took me fishing when I was two, and that is the age at which I caught my first trout. No doubt, with hindsight, it was my father who caught it, but I reeled it in, and in that moment, like the trout, I was hooked. When I was a small child – four or five years old – I would insist on going to the river with him. As a passionate salmon fisherman, he didn’t want the distraction of a boy pestering him. So he gave me an old, broken trout rod which had belonged to his father, and tied a length of baler twine around a tree, then paced out a short distance from the water’s edge and tied the other end around my belt. This allowed him to fish every pool down, close enough to know that I was safe, and for me to flail the rod around pointlessly – but utterly convinced I would catch something – without any chance of falling into the water.
Arrived back at the shop after lunch to find that the best sale of the day was the Georgian mahogany chest commode. I bought it about ten years ago for £80 at the auction in Dumfries, and used it as a glorified plant pot for a Boston fern that lived in the drawing room for most of that time. Eventually I decided to get rid of it. I can’t remember why. Perhaps I bought something that looked less like a loo for my Boston fern. We sold it for £200 to a charming woman who was delighted with it. Nicky, who mocked me relentlessly about it and was convinced it would never sell, will be furious to be proved wrong.
Till total £342.49
15 customers
FRIDAY, 13 JUNE
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Nicky and Laurie were both in the shop today.
Nicky arrived and stared at the space where the commode had been: ‘Where’s that hideous thing gone? Dinnae te
ll me that some idiot’s bought it. Oh no, surely naebody could be that daft.’
A ferrety man wearing a beret came to the counter and said, ‘Just thought I’d tell you, you’ve got a book in the railway section called The Railway Man. It’s not about railways, you need to move it to the right section.’
No. I need to bludgeon you with it. There is a certain kind of customer who delights in pointing out that a book is in the wrong section, as though they’re showing you that they know more about books than you do. More often than not, when a book is in the wrong section, it is because a customer has put it there, not a member of staff.
Among the books from the Glasgow deal on Thursday was one called The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller, published in 1942. As with many book deals, it is hard to resist dipping into some of the titles as you price them up, and this one seemed particularly relevant so I put it to one side and began to read it after I had closed the shop.
Till total £164.50
15 customers
SATURDAY, 14 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky in. Drove to Dunkeld for a friend’s fiftieth.
Till total £188.28
26 customers
MONDAY, 16 JUNE
Online orders: 1
Books found: 1
Laurie covered the shop today.
Anna and I drove from Dunkeld to Stuart Kelly’s house in the Borders to pick up books, then spent the afternoon in Summerhall in Edinburgh with him. Stuart is a writer, journalist, literary critic and former Booker Prize judge. Because of the latter, he receives dozens of books every day from publishers, desperate for him to review them. These he puts in piles until there are enough to justify me driving over to his house and picking them up. He is a festival regular, an extraordinary intellect and a good friend. Summerhall used to be part of the Royal Dick School of Veterinary Studies, informally known as the ‘Dick Vet’, the veterinary school of Edinburgh University. It has been bought by an Irish philanthropist friend of his and is now full of artists and creative types. Wandering around it, I thought of my grandfather, who completed his PhD in the 1930s in the same buildings.
While we were away, I asked Laurie to make a note of a few things customers asked her during the day. Her note reads:
‘Why is Wigtown called Wigtown?’
‘Why is Wigtown a book town?’
‘How many bookshops are in Wigtown?’
The last two are asked on average twice daily all year round. After fifteen years, that means that I have been asked those same questions 9,360 times. It’s hard to muster any enthusiasm when I reply now. Perhaps it’s time to start inventing fresh answers that have absolutely no basis in fact.
We arrived back in Wigtown at 7 p.m.
Till total £114.50
12 customers
TUESDAY, 17 JUNE
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Laurie was in again today, which turned into a balmy, sunny day after an unpromising start. Both of the online book orders today were AbeBooks, no Amazon, which is extremely unusual. I set her to work packaging the books for the Random Book Club’s June mail-out. We are back up to about 140 members. She stamped them and processed them through the Royal Mail web site. The cost of postage this month was £244.12. I have alerted Wilma, and she will send the postman around tomorrow to pick up the five sacks.
As it was a pleasant day, I spent much of it working in the garden. By mid-afternoon it was too hot, so Anna and I went to the beach at Garlieston and had a swim in the sea.
When I was locking up the shop, the telephone rang. It was a local woman who had books to sell, mostly Folio Society:
‘You’ll have to come to my house to view them, I am housebound.’
‘How would next Tuesday suit?’
‘As long as it’s not in the morning, the nurse comes on Tuesday morning to dress a wound on my leg. It’s terrible. Weeping sore, had it for years. Oozes the most disgusting pus.’
I have arranged to visit her on the afternoon of the 24th.
Till total £237.49
17 customers
WEDNESDAY, 18 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Today both online orders were Amazon, no AbeBooks orders – the reverse of yesterday.
Another day of blazing sunshine, but I was stuck in the shop as Nicky and Laurie were both unavailable. Jim McMaster arrived at 9 a.m. for a poke around the shop. He went through the boxes from the Glasgow deal, only a few of which we had processed and shelved in the previous two weeks. Jim is a book dealer from Perthshire. He started out in the book trade as a runner for Richard Booth in Hay-on-Wye. A runner buys books to sell to the trade, usually on request – so, for example, Booth might say to Jim, ‘I need 500 books on African wildlife’, and Jim would set off in a car or van and scour bookshops throughout the country for bargains until he had 500. Jim has an encyclopaedic knowledge of books. When I started out, in 2001, he could scarcely have been more helpful, giving me pointers here and there each time he came to the shop. He is one of the few dealers who will still visit other dealers’ shops in search of fresh stock, and on the occasions when I have bought large quantities of books from people – in 2008 I cleared 12,000 books from a house in Gullane, near Edinburgh – Jim has come down and sorted through them, shifting bulk quantities to his contacts in the trade. He is a well-known, well-respected and well-liked figure in the second-hand book trade. Oddly enough, I was reading The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller this morning and came across a passage that reminded me of David McNaughton, from whom I acquired the book signed by Florence Nightingale. Jim and David belong to the old school, and Baxter’s words resonated when I read them:
I say that these old fellows are the backbone of the book trade. As they drop off one by one, like leaves from a tree, there is a gap which no modern pushful young salesman can fill, and they leave a memory that is a good deal more fragrant than the smelly hair-oil of those Smart Alecs who come asking me for a job in the confident tones of one who is quite prepared to teach me my own business.
Not that Jim is particularly old, or in danger of dropping off.
At 11 a.m. the telephone rang – it was Mr Deacon: ‘My apologies for the quality of the line. I am in Patagonia. Could you order me a copy of In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin? I will be back next week.’
An American woman spent an hour taking books off the shelves in the children’s section and checking prices on Amazon on her laptop. Right in front of me, completely shamelessly. Before I had the opportunity to rebuke her for this practice, the postman arrived to pick up the Random Book Club sacks, and by the time he and I had loaded them into his van, she had vanished.
The shop was quiet all afternoon until 4.59 p.m., when a middle-aged couple wandered in, the man humming irritatingly to himself. Both headed straight for the boxes of fresh unpriced stock from Stuart Kelly and began raking through them, taking things out and piling them up all over the floor. They left at 5.10 p.m. without putting any of them back or buying anything, complaining loudly that the shop should be open until 7 p.m. Boxes of fresh stock attract customers like moths to a flame.
Any bookseller will tell you that, even with 100,000 books neatly sorted and shelved in a well-lit, warm shop, if you put an unopened box of books in a dark, cold, dimly lit corner, customers will be rifling through it in a matter of moments. The appeal of a box of unsorted, unpriced stock is extraordinary. Obviously the idea of finding a bargain is part of it, but I suspect it goes well beyond that and has parallels with opening gifts. The excitement of the unknown is what it’s all about, and it’s something to which I can relate – buying books is exactly that. Driving towards any book deal, whether a private collection, an institution or a business, there’s always the same slight quickening of the pulse which comes with the anticipation that there might be something really special in this lot; and there often is, whether it’s an early
Culpepper, incunabula, an early Ian Fleming first in a mint jacket, a fine calf craft-binding or just something that you’ve never come across before. I have yet to find a book bound in human skin, but a dealer I know once found one in a house in Castle Douglas.
Till total £163.99
17 customers
THURSDAY, 19 JUNE
Online orders: 6
Books found: 5
Nicky was in today. Her plan to turn her van into a mobile shop has been temporarily put on hold because the back door won’t open. She has decided instead that she is going to buy an old mobile library from the council and convert that.
In the morning I started going through Hamish Grierson’s books, which he had dropped off when I was in Dunkeld. Hamish is a retired antique dealer and a book collector, so a regular customer. The books were mainly about prehistory and in good condition. When I was checking the prices of some of the more interesting books from his collection on AbeBooks to see what other people are selling them for so that I could work out a fair price for him, I told Nicky that I was going to offer him £100 for them, to which she replied, as she always does, that I ought to halve the figure.
Anna insisted that, since it was a clear, sunny day, we climb Cairnsmore, the granite lump of a hill on the far side of Wigtown Bay. We left at 3 p.m. and reached the summit at 4.30 p.m. and were back home by 6.30 p.m. It is always entertaining doing this sort of thing with Anna: it is always she who suggests it, then very soon into the adventure she will start complaining bitterly about it, becoming increasingly vocal and miserable. Then, once it is done, she will announce, ‘Wow, that was awesome.’ On one occasion we decided to cycle forty miles around forestry tracks in the Galloway Hills. After about twenty miles of steadily escalating complaints, she dismounted, lay on a rock and said, ‘Leave me here. Save yourself.’