The Diary of a Bookseller
Page 13
Till total £155.44
23 customers
FRIDAY, 20 JUNE
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
Laurie was in the shop today, so I drove Anna to Dumfries in the morning to catch the train to London. I am not sure when she will be back in Wigtown again. It depends, I suppose, on how she gets on with her various projects, which now include the Rockets script, as well as a NASA documentary, a young adult novel and a romantic comedy script on which she has been working with her friend Romiley.
After lunch I telephoned Hamish Grierson to offer him £100 for his books. He was not very happy about it at all and complained that there were some valuable books in there. This is bad news, as Nicky has already priced most of them up and put them out on the shelves. He told me he will call back on Monday with more information.
At closing time a man telephoned to ask if I could look at his book collection at the Schoolhouse in Port Logan, a pretty fishing village south of Stranraer. I have arranged to go there tomorrow afternoon.
Till total £164.50
15 customers
SATURDAY, 21 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky in.
Just before 1.30 p.m. I remembered that I had arranged to look at the books in Port Logan and headed over there. I overshot and ended up at the neighbouring, almost identically named, Old Schoolhouse. I knocked on the door and was met by an elderly couple, who explained that I had driven past ‘Bob and Barbara’s house’ and pointed me in the right direction. As I was leaving, the old man said, ‘Give my regards to your parents. Your father and I used to do the commentary at the Lochinch Game Fair.’ I have no idea who he was, but, following their instructions, I drove the short distance to the correct house and was greeted by Barbara and her two dogs.
The house was a beautifully converted Victorian school with stunning views across the Irish Sea. There was a ruined pier here in days gone by, but that was replaced by a quay and a bell tower designed by Thomas Telford in 1818. What is left is what Seamus Heaney might have described as ‘the hammered shod of a bay’. Bob and Barbara – a retired couple – showed me through the house to their library. Both Bob and I had to drop our heads because of the low door into the room. They left me to go through the books, which were mostly paperbacks in near new condition.
We chatted about living in so far-flung a village for a while, and I was surprised how well we got on: most book deals involve the minimum of conversation. I picked out five boxes’ worth, gave them £65 and drove back. The books included some excellent, very saleable material: sets of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Chandler, Buchan, all in uniform editions, and a good number of Penguin Modern Classics. Their taste in books was remarkably similar to mine, and I wonder not only whether that was why I found them so agreeable but also whether I would have enjoyed their company as much had I not been aware that our reading tastes were so compatible.
Alastair and Leslie Reid came over for supper. Alastair’s response to the question of what he would like to drink is invariably ‘Whisky’. This time I was prepared and had a bottle of Laphroaig handy. It is unfortunate that Anna has gone back to London, because it turns out that Alastair used to share a lift to Sarah Lawrence College with her hero, Joseph Campbell. She would have been ridiculously excited. Alastair has rubbed shoulders with many of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, once famously incurring the wrath of Robert Graves in Spain by eloping with his muse, Margot Callas.
Till total £196.90
25 customers
MONDAY, 23 JUNE
Online orders: 8
Books found: 5
Laurie was in today. Her cat had kittens last night and she was up for most of the night looking after them, so she was barely functional today.
Hamish Grierson called again about his books. He had a list of the more valuable titles that he was cross about. Laurie checked and found that they had already been listed online. She had mistaken them as coming from the Glasgow deal from the first week of the month, which she had been working on. So at least we’ve found them and I can work out a fair price for him.
Till total £385.98
26 customers
TUESDAY, 24 JUNE
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
Laurie was in today, so I brought the June random books over from the store in the garden for her to pack up. The number of subscribers is about 150.
After lunch I went to look at the book collection of the woman who telephoned last week with the weeping sore on her leg. The house was in Creetown, about ten miles away, and I bought about twenty Folio Society titles, including some good John Buchans as well as a few others. She is a very elderly woman, and is house-bound. In the driveway to her house – a modern bungalow with a sea view – there was a rusting old Ford Capri, up on blocks with the wheels removed. A middle-aged man, who seemed to know even less about car mechanics than I do, was tinkering nervously with bits of the engine. The transaction was straightforward, and we had a chat about the reason she is selling the books. She retired here from Yorkshire, and her granddaughter has just been offered a place at Oxford, so she’s trying to help her out financially by selling the books to raise some cash. I gave her £70 for a box and a half of books.
The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller is turning out to be almost as entertaining as William Y. Darling’s The Bankrupt Bookseller. In the editorial notes Augustus Muir (with reference to Jimmie Scriving) describes him as ‘a young ruffian, with no thoughts higher than his stomach’.
Hamish Grierson called and we agreed a price of £225 for his books.
Till total £123
14 customers
WEDNESDAY, 25 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Laurie in. One of the orders was for a book called A Guide to the Orthodox Jewish Way of Life for Healthcare Professionals.
Kate, the postie, arrived in with the mail at exactly the same time as Mr Deacon appeared. Among the post was a parcel containing his copy of In Patagonia. He paid for it and left, offering not the slightest clue as to what he had been doing in Patagonia, and not affording me the opportunity to ask. Not that I would have asked. It is none of my business, although the fishing there is among the best in the world and I admit that I am curious that he may have been over there in pursuit of trout.
I spent much of the day filming at the Galloway Activity Centre on Loch Ken. They have built two eco bothies and need videos to promote them. Over the years all the money I have generated from making films for people in the area has been ploughed back into that side of the business in the form of equipment, and we now have what amounts to an impressive amount of kit, including a jib, several very good camcorders, microphones and even a drone. Anna went to film school in Prague, but – apart from an MA in Creative Sound Production – I am completely self-taught and consequently probably incompetent. Although the income generated by Picto (the film business) is relatively small in comparison to that of the shop, I am confident that, if the bookselling business was no longer viable and I had more time, we could build this up into a good business. At the moment, though, it is more of a hobby for which I am paid, and I never actively seek out work: enough comes our way to be manageable. Any more would not be.
In the evening there was a piece on Front Row on Radio 4 about the author James Patterson’s crusade against Amazon. He is a staunch advocate of bookshops and a vocal critic of Amazon. In his interview he announced that he intends to give £250,000 to UK bookshops in the form of grants of up to £5,000 each for initiatives that encourage children to read. It seems like a perfect fit for expanding the Random Book Club to include a children’s section and overhaul the web site, which is now causing me enormous headaches.
Till total £343.67
33 customers
THURSDAY, 26 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Online o
rder for a book called Experiences of a Railway Guard: Thrilling Stories of the Rail.
Sandy the tattooed pagan came to the shop just after lunch and dropped off a dozen sticks. We have sold quite a few since his last visit. They sell particularly well at this time of year. He spent £33 of his credit on books about Celtic mythology.
In the early afternoon a young woman brought in three boxes of books to sell. Most of them were antiquarian calf-bound sets of the usual suspects: Gibbon, Scott, Macaulay, that sort of thing. Not particularly valuable or sought after, but they look nice on a shelf, and occasionally someone will buy them for this reason. They make good wedding presents. She had inherited them from her grandparents and wasn’t interested in keeping them, so I gave her £200 for them. As I was pricing them up, I noticed that volume I of the set of Scott’s Poetical Works (from around 1830) had eight different names written (in different hands) on one of the publisher’s blank pages, each one a life about which I know no more than the name. I wonder whose name will be added to the list next.
Till total £184
15 customers
FRIDAY, 27 JUNE
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
Nicky was in today. She turned up and asked me to give her a hand taking something out of her van that she wanted to sell in the shop. It was a beautiful day, and as soon as she opened the side of her van I saw, to my horror, a mobility scooter. She had been in Castle Douglas yesterday with her friend Iris, who, for reasons unknown, is an expert on mobility scooters. They had spotted it in a charity shop window, and Iris had told Nicky it was under-priced, so Nicky raced in and bought it. I told her that there was no way I was going to start selling mobility scooters in the shop and eventually conceded that she could leave it outside the shop with a ‘For Sale’ sign on it. She tested it by riding it to the co-op and back. We made a bet in the morning that she would never sell it. By 5 p.m. she had sold it for £150 to Andy, a Wigtown resident, originally from South Africa, who had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
So I lost the bet and had to take Nicky to The Ploughman (the pub in Wigtown named after a book by John McNeillie, The Wigtown Ploughman: Part of His Life, first published by Putnam’s in 1939 and still in print today) and buy her a pint. We sat out on the pavement in the sun with Callum and a few other friends for an hour or two.
Today was the last day of term for the Scottish schools, so hopefully trade should pick up now as people come to Galloway for their holidays. The peaks and troughs of the business follow the timing of school holidays.
Till total £261.99
20 customers
SATURDAY, 28 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky was in again today, and is more or less back to her usual Friday/Saturday routine. I left at 5.30 a.m. to catch the ferry to Belfast, then the train to Dublin to visit Cloda. She is a friend from my time in Bristol. She now runs the family business, a pharmacy in Dublin, and we often exchange customer stories. Hers tend to be more dramatic than mine, and regularly involve heroin addicts, attempted robberies etc. Her friendship is invaluable, as it makes me feel that I am not the only person among my group of friends who is being driven mad by the public. And although Amazon has yet to branch into prescription medicine in the way that it has done with almost everything else, Cloda’s business faces similar problems as an independent competing against chains such as Lloyds and Boots.
I arrived in Dublin in the early afternoon and made my way to Cloda’s house in Stoneybatter. We had lunch, and I met her six-month-old baby, Elsa, for the first time, before we drove to the docks to pick up Anna, who had made her way over from London via Holyhead. Cloda had invited us over for an open-air concert in a park in south Dublin, headlined by Pixies and Arcade Fire. It was the first time I’d been to anything like that for years. Her partner, Leo, and her friend Roisin were there too. It was a warm, summer evening and a thoroughly good night. A scouser offered me half an E, after I had bought him a pint, but I politely declined.
Till total £143
15 customers
MONDAY, 30 JUNE
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
I must remember to apply for the James Patterson grant.
Till total £203.45
15 customers
JULY
There are two well-known types of pest by whom every secondhand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying.
George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’
There is certainly still no shortage of people who darken the shop’s door with the intention of trying to sell worthless books. Most days, particularly during spring, will bring a fresh wave of them to the shop. On average, I would say a hundred books a day come through the door this way. Of these – again on average – I would offer money for fewer than 30 per cent. The remainder I would rather they took away, but often they are clearing out someone’s house – a dead aunt, grandmother or parent – and have no desire to have anything more to do with the books, so would rather leave them in the shop. In these instances, when dealing with the recently bereaved, the entreaty is often impossible to refuse. We used to stockpile these on pallets and sell them on eBay, but even that market seems to have dried up. What to do with this dead stock is increasingly becoming a problem for us and many booksellers.
Of the other type of person to which Orwell refers – the person who orders books without intending to pay for them – there certainly used to be such people until just a few years ago. Now we are rarely asked to order books thanks to the ease with which people can do it themselves from home. Or anywhere. Ordering books for customers was never a particularly lucrative exercise, but it was a small supplement to the shop’s income, and one that is now lost.
TUESDAY, 1 JULY
Online orders: 4
Books found: 2
Laurie couldn’t make it in to work today because her cat was hit by a car and had to be taken to the vet. Unfortunately it died, leaving her with four very small kittens to look after.
Among the orders this morning was one for The Colliery Fireman’s Pocket Book, 1935 edition. For some reason Nicky had listed this as being shelved in the chemistry section, but it was not there.
The lease on Anna’s flat runs out at the end of this month, so she has asked me if I can drive to London with the van and bring all her possessions back to Wigtown.
Matthew, a book dealer who sells at fairs and specialises in high-end material, came in and fished out a few things from the Glasgow deal, much of which was still boxed. He is another of the handful of dealers who still regularly visits the shop to buy. Fifteen years ago dealers were regular customers, coming in and buying up stock on their particular specialism. Now they are so rare that it is unusual to see them at all. Matthew deals in rare books, and mainly sells at book fairs: not the provincial fairs, but the big antiquarian fairs – Olympia, York – and the others where the average price of a book is in the thousands of pounds, rather than the tens. He only buys books in fine condition, and usually it is modern first editions. He travels all over Europe looking for books to buy and sell on at fairs, and he is like a terrier when it comes to negotiating.
Till total £291.44
21 customers
WEDNESDAY, 2 JULY
Online orders: 6
Books found: 6
Laurie was absent again today due to kitten-minding duties. One of today’s online sales was to someone called Keith Richards in London, and another to someone with the unlikely name of Jeremy Wildboar-Hands.
Email from a widow in Norwich wanting to sell me her late husband’s book collection. Emailed her to ask what it was.
Till total £280
21 customers
THURSDAY, 3 JULY
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br /> Online orders: 3
Books found: 1
Today I was supposed to drive to London to clear Anna’s flat, but I have postponed it because Laurie couldn’t make it in as she is on kitten duty. She didn’t seem to mind, and the flat is hers until the end of the month, so she is not about to be turfed out onto the street.
Today was a warm day, although several customers came in dressed as though it was January.
The swallow chicks have started to fly. Captain is keeping a close eye on them.
The widow from Norwich replied to my inquiry about her late husband’s book collection. Apparently it is mainly erotica. She is going to organise a courier to ship it up to the shop.
Till total £247.88
17 customers
FRIDAY, 4 JULY
Online orders: 4
Books found: 3
Nicky was in to work in the shop today. She was unable to disguise her delight on hearing the news that I would be away for the next two days, first to clear Anna’s flat, and then on to Somerset for my cousin Suzie’s wedding.
I bade Nicky as fond a farewell as our relationship permits and left for London in the blazing sunshine at 11 a.m., arriving in Hampstead at 7 p.m., after I had dropped books off at the auction in Dumfries en route. Normally I send anything really rare to Lyon & Turnbull’s Edinburgh saleroom, and the Dumfries auction has become more fussy, so I can’t dump rubbish there any more, but occasionally I find myself buying something that I know will sell there but not in the shop: sets of reasonably good bindings, for example. They tend to be bought by antique furniture dealers at the saleroom because – when they’re selling bookcases – they are far easier to sell if they have nice-looking books on them.