The Diary of a Bookseller
Page 21
Till total £143.90
14 customers
WEDNESDAY, 8 OCTOBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 4
Just before lunch a customer offered £10 for a book that we have priced at £80. I told him that if he asked politely he could have £10 off. He slammed the book down on the counter and walked out in ‘disgust’, at which point I decided that escapism from customers was the order of the day, and found a new book to read and hid in the office with Kidnapped – a fate I would quite happily have seen befall that last customer.
Till total £264.49
19 customers
THURSDAY, 9 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
All of today’s orders were from Amazon.
The shop was quiet today. The contrast with last week is extraordinary.
One of the few customers was a woman who spent ten minutes wandering around the shop before coming to the counter and asking, ‘So what is The Book Shop? Do you sell the books or what? Do people just come in and take them?’ Temporarily stupefied, I was unable to answer. Thankfully, she broke the silence and ploughed on, ‘I am not from here, I am a tourist. Do people just hand you the books in? What happens in here? Is that what happens in here?’ I began what with hindsight was a pointless attempt to explain the basic principles of retail, which frankly, she ought to have grasped by the age of roughly fifty, but she meandered out of the shop while I was explaining it to her.
Sandy the tattooed pagan appeared at about 3 p.m. and found two books. Have deducted them from his credit.
Till total £222.45
19 customers
FRIDAY, 10 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
The missing book from today’s orders was yet another one that we had failed to delist before sending our old warehouse stock to Ian.
At 11 a.m. a customer came to the counter with some maps of Ireland, demanding to know the year in which each was published. He then started the dreaded ‘Let me tell you why I am looking for old maps and books about this area, it’s because I am doing family history research and my great-grandfather …’ for about five minutes before I could explain that the maps were undated, but probably from around 1910.
I am going to get a mask and paint ‘I DON’T CARE’ on the forehead and put it on when such occasions arise in the future.
Someone in the planning department came to inspect the book spirals. It appears that a complaint has been made about them, so now I have to get planning permission. She was remarkably decent about it all and said that if it were up to her she would just ignore the fact that I hadn’t applied for permission for them, but because there has been a formal complaint and the shop is a listed building, they have no choice but to go through the process.
The Guardian published ‘Weird and wonderful bookshops worldwide’; we are number 3 again. I’m not sure if these things go in cycles, or whether bookshops are suddenly becoming fashionable places. Perhaps it is the hipster movement driving the trend to be seen with vinyl and real books instead of iPods and Kindles.
Till total £133
15 customers
SATURDAY, 11 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Nicky was in today, so I went to the river with my father in the morning. He caught a 12lb salmon; I blanked. We were fishing a pool called Wilson’s, on the top beat of the river – the pool in which I caught my first salmon (under my father’s watchful eye). It was 9lb, caught on 9 September, and I was nine years old. If I believed in luck, I suppose that nine ought to be my lucky number.
I returned to the shop at lunchtime and gave Nicky a break, during which a customer came to the counter and announced, ‘I don’t want to appear rude, but your railway section is mainly pot-boiler coffee-table-type books, and I am looking for something very specific blah blah blah …’ He continued in this vein for a couple of minutes before getting to the point and telling me the title of the book he was looking for, by which time I was incandescent and his wife was cringing and mouthing ‘sorry’ at me from behind him.
Within a minute of being told the title I had located a copy of the book, at which point he decided that he didn’t actually want it after all.
Prefacing a sentence with ‘I don’t want to appear rude, but …’ flags up the same alarm bells as ‘I am not racist, but …’ It’s quite simple: if you don’t want to appear rude, don’t be rude. If you’re not a racist, don’t behave like a racist.
Till total £312.30
22 customers
MONDAY, 13 OCTOBER
Online orders: 4
Books found: 2
Flo in.
As I came down the stairs with two cups of tea at 11 a.m. I literally bumped into Mr Deacon, covering his shirt with hot tea. He didn’t seem to mind in the slightest and pointed out several other stains he had inflicted on the shirt while he was having his breakfast that morning. He asked if we could order him a copy of Kate Whitaker’s A Royal Passion.
Went to the river after lunch and caught a 7lb salmon.
Till total £352.99
27 customers
TUESDAY, 14 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Two complete strangers came into the shop at the same time and in an extraordinary coincidence both asked at the same time for a copy of Gavin Maxwell’s House of Elrig. Sadly we don’t have a copy or I could have orchestrated a bidding war.
Ronnie the electrician turned up when the shop was full of customers and started loudly describing the various ways in which we could blow up Kindles. He has a disconcertingly comprehensive knowledge of bomb-making. I will probably go for a sugar/sodium chlorate mix, although he seems quite keen to try an oxyacetylene bomb. Customers who arrived half-way through the conversation gave him a wide berth.
Quiet day compared with yesterday.
Till total £72.30
11 customers
WEDNESDAY, 15 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Flo was in today. She seems to have mastered her pout, and spent most of the day demonstrating it.
When I was at the counter, an old traveller man who had not been in the shop for years arrived with a coffee table that had been made to look like two giant books. He wanted £60 for it. We settled on £35. The last time I saw him (about ten years ago) he came in and asked for a copy of The Tinkler-Gypsies. My father was in the shop at the time and instantly recognised him. Apparently he’d ‘bought’ scrap machinery from Dad about thirty years ago, when he was farming, but had never returned to pay him. He asked me if I had a copy of a book he was looking for, and when I replied, ‘Yes, The Tinkler-Gypsies’, he looked quite taken aback. The Tinkler-Gypsies is a book written by a lawyer from Newton Stewart called Andrew McCormick in 1906. It is a detailed account of the Galloway traveller community at the time and a valuable historical and social record. For a while copies would quickly sell for over £100 and were snapped up, but I see that it is now available as an e-book, which means that values have probably crashed.
Ecotricity, the company behind the proposed wind farm, have appealed to the Scottish government to have the council’s decision to reject it overturned.
Till total £382.32
30 customers
THURSDAY, 16 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
In the inbox today was an email from Stuart Kelly, to which he attached the following rejection letter from a friend of his who had applied for a job in a bookshop:
Dear XXX,
We have too many people here. That they are all idiots is neither here nor there. I like them. They are firm, and peachy bottomed. I pay them £3 an hour. As a man with ambitions to enter the world of publishing, where artistic talent is sucked dry for profit, I imagine this sort of wage won’t appeal.
One of them now is prattling abo
ut Bonnie Prince Charlie. Do I care? No, I do not. But I am fond of her. She pulls her weight. She ‘mucks in’, so to speak. Would you muck in? I doubt it. I think you’d run away to Italy and live out your life in indolence and drunkenness.
PROVE ME WRONG. COME IN AND WORK FOR FREE FOR MONTHS ON END WHILST RECEIVING ABUSE, SOME OF IT SEXUAL. YOU WILL WEAR A DUNCE’S CAP, AND A LOINCLOTH, AND BE FORCED TO EAT RAW SHRIMP, DAY IN, DAY OUT. DO YOU _LOVE_ THE SECOND HAND BOOK INDUSTRY ENOUGH TO HACK IT? WELL DO YOU? This is what we call an ‘internship’. It looks good on CVs.
I suppose we’ll see.
Yours,
XXX
Another anonymous postcard arrived in the post this morning. This one reads: ‘The Bookshop has a thousand books, all colours, hues and tinges, and every cover is a door that turns on magic hinges.’ I suspect that posting the first one on the shop’s Facebook page last week may well trigger even more of them.
Mr Deacon’s book arrived, so I called to let him know.
Till total £309.49
26 customers
FRIDAY, 17 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 1
Nicky appeared just a moment after I had opened the shop and thrust what at first glance looked like something from a hospital clinical waste bin under my nose. It was fleshy and covered in what appeared to be blood. ‘It’s a jam doughnut from the Morrison’s skip. It got a bit squashed in the back of the van. Try it, they’re delicious.’ It was even more revolting than it looked. ‘It’s Foodie Friday,’ she reminded me.
As we were chatting about what to do for the day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Smelly Kelly, her irrepressible suitor, or had my nostrils assaulted by the lingering stench of Brut 33 for a while. I asked Nicky if she had seen him recently, to which she nonchalantly replied, ‘Did you not hear? He died three weeks ago.’
Three people turned up with boxes of books to sell today, including a very tall, well-spoken man in his seventies who arrived with seventeen large plastic crates full of all sorts of books, including one illustrated and signed by Aubrey Beardsley. I gave him £800 for them.
We were chatting about families, and he told me that his had been extremely wealthy until his great-grandfather lost everything on ‘drink, gambling and women’. His grandfather became the first male heir in generations to be forced to secure a proper job, so he went to Cambridge and became a gynaecologist. Because the family was well connected, he ended up becoming gynaecologist to the royal family: ‘He was Queen Mary’s cunt mechanic.’
Two more anonymous postcards. One read: ‘Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate’, while the other read: ‘Be advised, my passport’s green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.’ The second seemed vaguely familiar, so I googled it. It is by Seamus Heaney in ‘An Open Letter’, and is his brilliantly petulant response to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry.
After the festival every year Anna and I have a night away in a hotel of a better standard than we would normally enjoy. This year Anna chose Glenapp Castle, near Ballantrae, so we left the shop at lunchtime and headed over there. I spent much of the afternoon lying on an enormous bed reading Kidnapped.
Nicky will open the shop tomorrow.
Till total £228.44
21 customers
SATURDAY, 18 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky stayed last night and opened the shop this morning. Anna and I returned from Glenapp at about lunchtime.
A customer came in with four bags of books, mainly rubbish, but they included a book called Once a Customer, Always a Customer, which I suspect he put in there deliberately to annoy me.
At 4 p.m. an unusually smart-looking Mr Deacon appeared to pick up his book. I commented that he was looking quite sharp, to which he simply replied ‘Funeral’ on his way out of the shop.
A couple with a young boy came in and bought books. The boy spotted Nicky’s notice inviting customers to be filmed reading from their favourite book and asked if he could read from his. He was seven and called Oscar. He read very clearly from a Harry Potter book, and afterwards Nicky asked him if he was reading anything now, to which he replied ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. Nicky was visibly impressed, and his parents looked justifiably proud. They explained that, although there are elements of it that are not particularly suitable for child to be reading, they didn’t think that he was old enough to understand the full implications of the ‘crime’ for which Tom Robinson was being tried. Apparently Oscar had asked if he could read it.
Till total £245.49
19 customers
MONDAY, 20 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Nicky came in today so that I could drive Anna to Dumfries to catch the train to London for meetings. After that, she will fly to America to work on a film for which one of her friends has raised the funding. On returning to the shop I discovered that the traveller who had sold me the giant book-shaped coffee table had been back in for our copy of The Tinkler-Gypsies. He had asked for a discount, but Nicky refused to budge on the price.
Three more anonymous postcards today, all with book-related facts.
Today in Scotland legislation came in to force that makes it compulsory to charge 5p to customers who wish to have a bag. The penalty for failing to charge for a bag is a £10,000 maximum fine. It might explain why I haven’t seen the rep from Marshall Wilson for quite a while. Marshall Wilson is a Glasgow-based company from whom we used to buy carrier bags. The rep would appear every quarter, although even before this legislation was first discussed I had noticed a steady decline in the number of customers asking for a bag and in the frequency of his visits. In 2001, when I bought the business, I didn’t even ask people if they wanted one – customers expected their books to be put in a carrier bag. Over the years, though, that has changed, and now when I ask customers if they would like a bag there is a more or less even split between those who do and those who do not. It will be interesting to see how this affects the demand for plastic bags. I feel a considerable degree of sympathy for the staff at Marshall Wilson, whose jobs are probably now on the line. I suppose a well-intentioned piece of legislation can have an unintended consequence on a small business whose trade is in such things. If the VAT rate on books rose from zero to 20 per cent, it would probably have a seriously detrimental effect on the trade in the same way that the 5p tax has impacted on the plastic bag industry.
Till total £250
23 customers
TUESDAY, 21 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
The first customer of the day came in with a box of books to sell that included a copy of Biggles Takes it Rough.
Kate, the postie, brought today’s post at 11 a.m. It included two more anonymous postcards. I asked her if she could tell Wilma that the six sacks of random books are ready to pick up, and if she would mind asking the postman who collects the mail at the end of the day to drop in and collect them.
A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.
The postman appeared at 4.30 p.m. and collected the sacks for the Random Book Cub.
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Just before I closed up there were two telephone calls, the first of them from a retired vicar in Durham with approximately a thousand books on theology. I have arranged to view them on Friday. The second call was from a woman whose parents lived in Newton Stewart. Her mother, a widow, died during the summer and the house is going on the market next week. She is up from London and has to have the books removed from the house by tomorrow evening.
Till total £166.99
17 customers
WEDNESDAY, 22 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Nicky was in, so I drove to the book deal in the house in Newton Stewart shortly after she arrived. There was some good local history material. Clearing the house was obviously going to be a fairly onerous task; it was full of cheap furniture and had not seen a hoover for a year or two. Normally Nicky works Friday and Saturday, and once the summer students go back to university it is just me in the shop for the rest of the week, but she is very obliging and flexible, and will come in on other days too if I can’t schedule a book deal for Friday or Saturday.