The Diary of a Bookseller
Page 17
THURSDAY, 21 AUGUST
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
Katie managed to struggle in today. I left at 5 a.m. for Grimsby and arrived at 10.45 a.m. Ian’s place is an old church right in the middle of Grimsby. He took it on three years ago with the intention of listing ten thousand or so books online. He has now decided to pack it in because it is becoming impossible to compete with the mega-listers, who put through such volume that Amazon and Royal Mail give them massive concessions that smaller dealers do not get.
Ian and I went through the boxes of stock I had sent to him two years ago to list online for me. I took out about ten boxes of material that I thought I could sell in the shop and sold the remainder to him for £500. He then offered me £1,500 for the books that he had already listed but hadn’t yet sold, which I accepted gladly.
My back is stiff after thirteen hours of driving and shifting boxes. Tonight I will sleep like Chichikov after his successful day of harvesting the names of the deceased in Plyushkin’s estate in Gogol’s Dead Souls – ‘a deep and sound sleep, into that wonderful sleep which only those fortunate folk enjoy who are unacquainted either with haemorrhoids, or fleas, or overly powerful mental capacities’.
Picked up a copy of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying from the Penguin Modern Classics section of the shop and began reading it again before going to bed. It was on the curriculum when I sat my ‘A’ levels, and I remember enjoying it back then.
Till total £603.63
41 customers
FRIDAY, 22 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Laurie was in today.
A less than friendly email this morning among this morning’s messages:
It is now 22nd August and I HAVE STILL NOT RECEIVED POMFRET TOWERS.
I LIVE IN CUMBRIA JUST ACROSS THE SOLWAY FIRTH FROM WIGTOWN.
A BOOK ORDERED VIA ABEBOOKS FROM SOUTH AFRICA ARRIVED IN TWO DAYS AND ALL OTHER ORDERS HAVE BEEN DESPATCHED AND RECEIVED PROMPTLY.
12 DAYS TO RECEIVE A BOOK FROM WIGTOWNSHIRE TO CUMBRIA IS FRANKLY UNACCEPTABLE. PERHAPS YOU SHOULD CONSIDER AN ALTERNATIVE METHOD.
After lunch I went to my parents’ house to get my shotgun and shoot a Kindle (broken screen, bought on eBay for £10), imagining it was the missing copy of Pomfret Towers. It was remarkably satisfying to blast it into a thousand pieces.
Before closing a man brought in three Ian Fleming first editions, including Dr No (lacking jacket), for which I gave him £150, then immediately regretted it. With hindsight, £100 would have been more than adequate.
Till total £296.47
20 customers
SATURDAY, 23 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
All the girls were off today. My back is excruciating, and now my left leg is numb. I called Carol-Ann, who has recently done something to her back. She told me that these are the symptoms of sciatica.
Two emails from Amazon customers complaining that they had been obliged to collect their parcels from the post office and pay extra because we had not stamped them. They were sent out on 14 or 15 August, so I checked the diary. On the 14th both Katie and Laurie were working in the shop. On the 15th it was just Katie. Someone is going to get a roasting when they recover and return to work.
I was looking for this morning’s orders when a customer asked, ‘What’s the oldest book you have in stock?’, then demanded to see it. It is a book called Martialis, dated 1501, so it misses the holy grail of being incunabula (the grandiose name for any printed book published before 1501) by the slenderest of margins. She then told me that she had an older book. I had been unaware that it was a competition. Our copy of Martialis – although not an incunable – has the distinction of being published by the Aldine Press, one of the most prestigious early Venetian printers, and famous in the world of typography for introducing italics to printing and for being the first printer to publish smaller books in the – now standard – ‘octavo’ size. It is also iconic for its device: an anchor with a dolphin weaving around it.
Till total £270.85
28 customers
MONDAY, 25 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Katie managed to shuffle in to work today. I brought up the subject of the parcel with the missing postage stamp on it. She conceded that it had probably been her fault.
Sandy the tattooed pagan brought in five sticks to replenish the stock.
My back is still agony. I had planned to go to the doctor but forgot that it is a bank holiday, so I telephoned my pharmacist friend Cloda. She recommended co-codamol, after which I went to the chemist only to discover that it was shut too, so I ended up buying paracetamol and ibuprofen from the co-op.
Telephone call from Mr Deacon asking if he could order a copy of Alison Weir’s Eleanor of Aquitaine. I asked him if he was quite sure, as we had recently ordered a copy for him. He paused, then replied, ‘Oh yes, I can see it on my desk. Where’s my list? Yes, I meant David Starkey’s Henry. Could you order that?’ I assured him that it would be here by the end of the week.
I left Katie in charge and drove to Glasgow to drop off forty boxes of reject stock at Cash for Clothes in Partick.
My memory is terrible, so I have made another note to apply for the James Patterson grant. It is now on my expanding list of things I will kick myself for not doing.
Till total £367.05
72 customers
TUESDAY, 26 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Laurie was in to work today. Moments after she arrived an enormous woman with a ginger Fu Manchu moustache bought a book about the making of the Lord of the Rings film.
A book dealer whom I hadn’t previously met came to the counter and asked if we had any rare firsts, so I told him that he could have the three Flemings that I had just bought for £200. He declined, but bought our War of the Worlds first edition for £225 and paid by cheque. He is the first person who has used a cheque in the shop this year. We used to bank two or three cheques a week when I first bought the shop, but now it’s mainly credit cards.
I had an appointment at the opticians in Newton Stewart after lunch. Following several tests Peter, the optician, told me that my eyesight was very similar to four years ago, when I was last there for a test. When I explained that I was having trouble reading in the bath, he asked, ‘Can you read in there better during the day?’ to which I replied that, yes – I could. He suggested changing the light bulb. We spent most of the appointment discussing mountain-biking and sailing, as usual. On the way out I ordered two new pairs of glasses.
Carol-Ann came round at 6.30 p.m. and asked if she could stay tonight. I called Callum and invited him for supper. Anna and Carol-Ann drove to the Chinese restaurant in Newton Stewart and picked up a take-away. This is what passes for ‘cooking’ in Anna’s world.
Till total £287.96
56 customers
WEDNESDAY, 27 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Nicky in.
Foodie Friday has apparently moved to Wednesday this week, and this morning I was greeted by a grinning Nicky: ‘Look, eh, I’ve brought you a packet of caramel digestives. They’re all melted into one massive lump though.’ She also brought in a bike to sell. I told her that there was no way anyone would be stupid enough to buy it. Shortly after she had put a ‘For Sale’ sign on it and leant it against the bench in front of the shop Smelly Kelly appeared and asked how much she wanted for it. She told him that he was a bit optimistic buying a bicycle, considering he is now walking on two crutches.
An older woman, probably in her late seventies, came in with a bag of books to sell. They were all erotica, and all photographic books from the 1960s. I checked one or two of them and they were reasonably valuable, so I gave her £50 for them. Just before she left she picked one of the books up and said, ‘See if you can work out which of the models in thi
s book is me.’
Carol-Ann stayed the night again.
Till total £461.39
34 customers
THURSDAY, 28 AUGUST
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
Katie was in today.
To my enormous irritation, Nicky’s bike sold. Her Facebook update read:
Sorry people, the bike has sold!
In its place though is a bespoke wooden table with a lift-up
lid! How cool is that! Yours for £20.
An elderly woman came to the counter with a book: ‘I’ll take this book, thank you. It’s for my son, you see. He’s a primary school teacher and he’s teaching the children about dinosaurs. I don’t know anything about them, and neither does he, so I have bought him this book. I’m seeing him next week and I’ll give it to him then. It’s his auntie Florence’s seventieth birthday. Do you know, she doesn’t look a day over sixty …’ And so it continued for a further ten minutes.
AbeBooks emailed to tell me that our account has been suspended because we have dropped below their order fulfilment minimum of 85 per cent for a month. I replied and asked how we could be reinstated.
An old man with a walking stick accosted Nicky as she was rifling through a box of books that was destined for Cash for Clothes – ‘I’m looking for a book, but I don’t know what it’s called. I know what it looks like, though. It’s a very old book.’
Sandy the tattooed pagan turned up with some more sticks. Sold one straight away.
Till total £388.03
39 customers
FRIDAY, 29 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Books found: 1
Nicky in again today. For Foodie Friday today she brought in bhajis and pickle – as always, pillaged from the Morrisons skip.
AbeBooks emailed me with a ridiculously complex explanation of how to reinstate our account, which involves me explaining why our fulfilment levels dropped, and what we are going to do to make sure that they improve. It felt very much like apologising for being caught smoking at school. I blamed Laurie and told the woman at AbeBooks (Emma) that I had sacked her for being lazy, and that this was my strategy for improving order fulfilment. She seemed quite satisfied with that.
In the afternoon I drove to Dumfries to look at the library of a retired Church of Scotland minister. He had recently lost his wife, but seemed surprisingly cheery in spite of this. Or perhaps because of it. I took one box of mixed material away and gave him £75. The only reasonable book was a copy of Galloway Gossip, which used to command a price of £40 but now makes less than £20.
Got back to the shop at 3.30 p.m., just in time to overhear a customer saying to her crumbling wreck of a husband, ‘I have just had a wander through the garden. There’s a gate with a sign which says “Private” but I went through anyway. It’s lovely.’
Nicky found a book called Working with Depressed Women, which she has decided to keep for herself. We went to the pub after closing the shop, and she spent the night in the festival bed.
Till total £328.89
27 customers
SATURDAY, 30 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Today we had our first AbeBooks order since June. They have clearly, finally, let us back on as sellers.
While Nicky was taking the mail bags to the post office, a customer found an 1876 edition of Daniel Deronda priced at £6.50 and brought it to the counter asking ‘How much could this be?’ I was sorely tempted to tell her that it ‘could be £7.50’. She didn’t even bother waiting for a reply, and went completely off-piste, saying ‘I found Venice terribly disappointing. It was full of tourists’, the perpetual complaint of the pretentious tourist.
I left Nicky in charge and drove to Glasgow airport with Anna, who’s going to visit her family in America.
Till total £211.86
29 customers
SEPTEMBER
We did a good deal of business in children’s books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petronius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators.
George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’
The children’s section of the shop is always a mess. No amount of tidying will keep it neat for more than a day or two, although we maintain the Sisyphean effort of trying to keep it so. As much as I’d like to blame the children who make it a mess, I suppose it’s just what children do. It gives me a glimmer of hope for the future of bookselling, though, to see a child reading, their attention rapt in the book to the total exclusion of everything else. In general, it appears – in my shop at least – that girls are more committed readers than boys. It was certainly something in which I had a limited interest as a child. Neither boys nor girls ever pick up Barrie, though. Of the Scottish writers of that period only Stevenson and Buchan seem to have stood the test of time, still selling well in the shop.
Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books are good sellers too, but to collectors rather than children. I once bought a set of them from another dealer, and took them to a book fair (another part of the trade that, with a few notable exceptions, appears to be exhaling the last rattling gasp of its dying breath). The most lucrative trade at book fairs takes place between dealers as they’re setting up stall, before the public comes in. This was no exception, and – less than a week after I had bought them for £400 – I sold the set of Lang’s Fairy Books for £550 to another bookseller at the Lancaster Book Fair. Since then I have not gone to another fair. The cost of travel, accommodation and the stall and the pitiful prices that people are prepared to pay for books these days have made all but the top-end fairs almost entirely financially unviable.
MONDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Laurie was in the shop today. After she arrived I drove to Newton Stewart to lodge last week’s takings at the bank and pick up my new glasses from the optician’s. Isabel turned up at 3.30 p.m., spotted my new specs and said, ‘Oh, they make you look quite intelligent.’ She could give lessons in damning with faint praise.
Till total £153.54
15 customers
TUESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 4
Books found: 2
Laurie in bright and early. At 2 p.m. a customer with a very neatly trimmed moustache came to the counter and said, ‘I’ve been looking for a copy of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World for years after I lent mine to a friend who never gave it back to me. I see you have a copy, but it’s £23. It seems a lot of money for an old book.’ So, after years of looking for a copy of The Worst Journey in the World, he finally found one, and a scarce edition too, but £23 was too much.
As I was sorting through the boxes of books from Haugh of Urr, I came across a copy of Collins French Phrasebook in a box. You really would have to be on the most dismal holiday to find the following phrases useful:
‘Someone has fallen in the water.’
‘Can you make a splint?’
‘She has been run over.’
‘Help me carry him.’
‘I wish to be X-rayed.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘I do not like this.’
‘The chambermaid never comes when I ring.’
‘I was here in 1940.’
‘Eleven hostages were shot here.’
Till total £218.93
20 customers
WEDNESDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Laurie opened the shop at 9 a.m., but neglected to turn the sign from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’. By the time I noticed it, 10.30 a.m., not a single customer had entered the shop.
A Shearings coach stopped outside the shop at 3 p.m. This invariably results in a busload of Yorkshire pensioners invading the shop, complain
ing about absolutely everything, taking anything that’s free, then leaving ten minutes later, urgently demanding to know where the nearest public toilet is. Today’s onslaught was made slightly more bearable by the coach driver, who was the only one of them to buy anything. We shared a look of mutual pity. Shortly after they all left, a woman wandered through the shop shouting, ‘Liz! Karen!’ at the top of her voice. It turned out that the Shearings coach was waiting for them before it could leave. The post-invasion tranquillity of the shop was briefly shattered by her high-pitched bawling.
The proposed wind farm at Kirkdale has been rejected by the planners. Although this is good news, the company pushing for it is well known for its ability to have local planning decisions overturned by Holyrood.
Laurie left at 3 p.m. Today was her last day. She is being employed by the Festival Company, though, to work upstairs as a venue manager later in the month. During the festival my drawing room is converted into the ‘Writers’ Retreat’, an area exclusive to visiting authors who are giving talks. We bring in a caterer, and writers are fed and plied with wine during their visit to Wigtown. Laurie will be given the job of making sure that everything runs smoothly, which it never does. One year one of our house guests had a bath on the morning of the first day of the festival, and, through no fault of his, the bath drain started leaking the moment he pulled the plug, and a torrent of water crashed through from the bathroom, soaking the electric cooker, which exploded with a bang. I had to telephone Carol-Ann and ask her to pick a new one up from Dumfries and bring it over with her. The surge in power when the cooker blew also destroyed the wireless router, so we had no internet, and later in the day the washing machine stopped working. Of all the essential facilities we need during the festival, these three are the most vital.
Till total £173.49