The Diary of a Bookseller
Page 22
Both Nicky and I keep forgetting to charge customers for carrier bags. We have resolved to rectify this by not even offering them a bag and leaving it up to them to ask.
Nicky took a telephone call from a man in Lochmaben with books to sell. I have scheduled him for Monday evening.
Till total £203.55
14 customers
THURSDAY, 23 OCTOBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 4
One of the missing orders this morning is called Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema. Bethan had listed it in the theology section.
I spent much of the day checking the prices of our antiquarian stock to make sure we were the cheapest online. In most cases, when we originally listed the books on Monsoon, we made sure that we undercut the competition, unless the only other copies were ex-library or in poor condition. If we sell our stock online at a fixed price, we make sure that we are the cheapest available. Only the cheapest copy will sell. Often we are undercut shortly afterwards, but unless we go back into the system and check, we have no way of knowing this, and if our copy is not the cheapest it will never sell. Most of our antiquarian stock has now been undercut, not just by other antiquarian copies but by Print on Demand copies. When a book is out of copyright, anyone is permitted to reprint it.
Until relatively recently this involved scanning or retyping the book and having a few hundred (or a few thousand) copies run off. This involved a cost, and also a financial risk, so most antiquarian books that were reprinted were local history books which the reprinters knew they could sell in their locale. In the first few years of this century, though, technology emerged by which anyone with a POD printer could print off single copies of out-of-print books at a relatively low cost. The consequence of this is that a search for a rare book on AbeBooks and many other web sites will throw up numerous cheap copies of books that do not exist until a customer orders them. It has driven the values of what were once rare books right down, as the seller is now competing in a market-place that is flooded with reprints, and we now rely on customers who want the original book for its own sake, rather than just for the information it contains. Couple this with the Google Books project, which plans to digitise and make free copies available of the 130 million or so unique titles that it has estimated exist in the history of publishing, and you have a lethal cocktail for those few of us left in the secondhand book trade.
Till total £852.50
9 customers
FRIDAY, 24 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Nicky arrived with a substance that bore no resemblance to food. ‘Chocolate éclairs. Delicious.’ And so began another Foodie Friday.
At 9.15 a.m. I was about to head off to County Durham to look at the theology library when she remembered to tell me that the minister had telephoned on Wednesday to say that he had already sold them to another dealer.
Diana, Anna’s friend, emailed to say that Eva, her fourteen-year-old daughter, will be arriving in Dumfries on Monday afternoon for a week’s work experience. I had completely forgotten that I had agreed to take her on for the week, but I remember her being a very charming girl, so hopefully it will work out well.
A customer asked me if I could help her find Christmas presents for her four daughters, but she couldn’t tell me what they were interested in or what her budget was, and since I have never met her children I had no idea what to suggest, although I was extremely grateful that she had decided to buy their Christmas presents in a second-hand bookshop. I recommended Philip Pullman and C. S. Lewis, both of whose works seem to have a broad appeal.
There has been a noticeable decrease in the numbers of people asking for bags, although English customers often look quite affronted when asked for 5p. I suspect that they are unaware that it is now a legal requirement and think they are being fleeced by greedy Scots.
A retired teacher from the nearby seaside village of Garlieston dropped in a few boxes of books, mainly book club fiction in poor condition, but I found a handful of interesting equestrian books on trap racing and gave him £20 for them.
Finished Kidnapped. It was a relatively early edition in a pictorial binding, so I put it back on the shelf. It is a title that always sells quickly.
Till total £149.39
16 customers
SATURDAY, 25 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Nicky stayed last night and opened the shop.
Captain spent the afternoon sleeping in an empty cardboard box in the Scottish room, to the delight of the customers.
Till total £170.99
12 customers
MONDAY, 27 OCTOBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 5
Nicky in again, and Kate the postie delivered three more anonymous postcards.
The telephone rang at 9.05 a.m.
Me: ‘Good morning, The Book Shop.’
Caller: ‘Oh, hello. Are you open today?’
The first customer of the day was a man with an extremely ill-advised Rolf Harris beard and high-handed tone: ‘Do you have any Folio Society books? You have heard of the Folio Society, haven’t you?’ This is tantamount to asking a farmer if he knows what a tractor is, so I told him that, yes, I have heard of the Folio Society, and have a stock of about 300 books published by them. He bought two of the most beautifully illustrated of the Folio titles, Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies. As he left, he apologised for his earlier tone, explaining that the last three bookshops he had been in had no idea what the Folio Society was.
After lunch I drove to Dumfries for an appointment with the back specialist at 3.15 p.m., then picked up Eva from the railway station. She is here until Friday. Once I had picked her up we drove to Lochmaben to look at books in a bungalow. The books were mainly slasher crime fiction paperbacks. The man was selling the books as his wife had advanced cancer, and he was moving her into a care home. He had bought a small flat so that he could be close to her, but there wasn’t enough space for the books. I gave him £40 for about sixty books.
In the van on the way home Eva was curious to find out about acquiring stock, and what factors determine which books I buy and how much I offer for them. I did my best to explain, but it caused me to reflect on quite how complex the process is. There are no rules, other than those you make for yourself.
I emailed Flo this morning to see if she can come in tomorrow for a few hours, just so that Eva has some company nearer her own age. I have arranged for her to work in the festival office on Wednesday (Anna’s suggestion) by way of a change of scene.
Till total £205.90
27 customers
TUESDAY, 28 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Eva eventually appeared at about 11 a.m. As with all new members of staff, I asked her to go around the shop and tidy the shelves to familiarise herself with the layout of the shop.
Kate the postie delivered a postcard this morning with this on the back: ‘Do not go gently into that good night, another double Scotch should see you right.’ The anonymous postcard trend seems to be gathering momentum. The postmark was Edinburgh.
Flo turned up at about 3 p.m. and taught Eva a few bad habits, including the importance of being rude to me and ignoring all of my instructions. Fortunately, Eva seems to be far too polite and well brought up to follow Flo’s feral example.
Till total £314.46
30 customers
WEDNESDAY, 29 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Books found: 1
Eva spent the day in the festival office. She came back at lunchtime exhausted from a morning of data entry, then headed back to an afternoon of more of the same. When she came back to the shop at 5 p.m., she told me that she had ‘nearly slipped into a boredom coma’.
Kate the postie delivered four more anonymous postcards.
A customer looking for books on dogs kept talking over me as I
attempted to direct her to the right section. I finally gave up and timed how long it took for her to stop talking. Two minutes and forty-three seconds.
After I closed the shop, I went for a walk with Eva to show her some of the more interesting parts of the town, including the martyrs’ graves, the medieval well and the monument on Windy Hill.
Till total £106
26 customers
THURSDAY, 30 OCTOBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 4
Today’s post brought four more anonymous postcards, including one quoting from The Meaning of Liff, a book in which Douglas Adams and John Lloyd took an assortment of British place-names and ascribed them meanings, as though in a dictionary. One of the postcards today read: ‘Moranjie (adj.) Faintly nervous that a particular post box “won’t work” when posting an important letter.’ But I think my favourite definition in The Meaning of Liff is ‘Mavis Enderby (n.) The almost-completely-forgotten girlfriend from your distant past for whom your wife has a completely irrational jealousy and hatred.’
Shortly after I had opened the shop, a family of five came in. The father – wearing a baseball cap and drinking a can of Tizer – wandered about muttering ‘ferret books’ repeatedly to himself. I had no idea it was still possible to buy Tizer.
At about 1 p.m., as I was sitting at the counter chatting to Eva, a large man came into the room from the back of the shop with his wife and headed towards the front door. As they were leaving, the wife asked him, ‘Are you going to buy anything?’, to which he replied, ‘No, I haven’t seen anything I like.’ Eva stared at me in open-mouthed disbelief, then told me that he had been sitting in the armchair by the fire since 10 a.m. working his way through a large pile of books that he had accumulated. Needless to say, he hadn’t bothered putting any of them back on the shelves, a task that Eva and I split evenly once he had left.
Eva’s mother emailed this morning asking if she could come home tonight because they are unexpectedly going away for a few days, so I telephoned Flo and asked if she could cover the shop for the afternoon – her first time locking up. Amazingly, she didn’t make a mess of it. I drove Eva to Dumfries in time to catch the 5.58 p.m. train. Sad to see her leave; she was splendid company to have in the house as the winter draws in and I am left alone with the cat.
Till total £292.99
32 customers
FRIDAY, 31 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Nicky in.
This morning Kate the postie delivered a Halloween anonymous postcard bearing the message that ‘Ray Bradbury was a descendant of one of the Salem witches.’ I asked Nicky to judge the postcards that had come in this week and pick a winner. She took it much more seriously than I had anticipated, going so far as to devise a system based on five criteria:
1. She had to understand the quotation on the back.
2. The picture on the card had to relate to the quotation on the back.
3. The card had to be recycled.
4. It had to make her laugh.
5. The quotation had to have some sort of reference to literature.
Just before closing, Mr Deacon appeared with two women who I would guess were about half his age. This time he was not looking quite so smartly dressed, and his shirt appeared to have acquired an impressive new tapestry of stains. I assume he wears the same shirt for funerals as he does for gardening. He bought a copy of Antonia Fraser’s King Charles II, then introduced his companions, who, it transpired, were his daughters. They had both seen the video of the shooting of the Kindle, as had Mr Deacon, much to my surprise. I didn’t imagine that he owned a single piece of technology, and that was why he bought books through me rather than Amazon or AbeBooks, but it appears that he is pretty au fait with computers – he just prefers to support local shops. Prior to meeting his daughters, I had assumed that Mr Deacon was a bachelor, and this tiny insight into his life somehow seemed like a sweeping canvas of information, compared with what little I knew about him before.
After work Tracy and I went for a drink to mark the end of her contract with the RSPB. Her summer of sitting in the Osprey Room of the County Buildings telling people that there are no ospreys in the nest has finally drawn to an end.
Till total £245.99
8 customers
NOVEMBER
Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers do not. You can get their measure by having a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you do not see an ad for Boswell’s Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The Mill on the Floss by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarised beyond a certain point.
George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’
If it was dealers confusing authors and titles in Orwell’s day, it is customers who are guilty of it today. I have been asked if we have a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four by Aldous Huxley on a number of occasions, and it’s not unheard of to be asked for a copy of Tom Jones by Helen Fielding. Nicky reminded me recently that Homage to Catalonia has been attributed to both Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene in the past month by customers. And the ‘trade papers’ to which Orwell refers have all but disappeared in the age of the internet. Even when I took over the shop, there was a good deal of trade within the industry, and networks whereby dealers contacted others to try to track down a book for a customer were still reasonably healthy. Now, of course, customers do not need us to track down titles. Two minutes online and they have a copy on the way to them. Occasionally now I still have a visit from a dealer looking for the odd bargain or – if they are a specialist – combing through a particular section to find titles they need to maintain a credible stock, but this is a rarity. Back in the early years it was common; one or two a week would make their presence known and eventually turn up at the counter with piles of books, present their business card and receive the standard 10 per cent trade discount. These days even customers demand a discount, and it is usually a lot more than 10 per cent. The demise of inter-trade business has also put an end to the career of the ‘runner’ – someone who would know the trade and a number of dealers and trawl the country’s bookshops, loading a van with stock bought from shops, which they knew they could sell at a small profit to other dealers. Much of the runner’s stock-in-trade would be topography – prior to the internet, a book about Galloway would be of little value to a bookshop in Dorset, and vice versa, so the runner would clean up by redistributing these things to a more appropriate geographical location. It makes no difference on Amazon now, though, where on the planet that book is. As for the ‘humane trade’ – it certainly was, but Amazon has rendered it cut-throat and barbaric.
SATURDAY, 1 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 6
Nicky stayed overnight and opened the shop this morning. When I asked her which was the winning postcard from the competition, she pointed to one that she had obviously written herself. It even had our Royal Mail stamp on it:
‘Cinderella!’ roared the wicked step-mother, splattering the customers in saliva and red hairs, ‘WHY is the stove lit and WHY are those 40 boxes of mouldy books neatly stacked and WHY have you dealt with all the orders efficiently?’ ‘You drive me INSANE! Go and water down the soup and spoon feed cream to the cat.’ ‘AND WHY is all this money in the till?’ ‘No more mouldy trifle for you, wretch.’
I’ve decided to read Andrew McNeillie’s biography of his father, John McNeillie, who wrote The Wigtown Ploughman, a novel published in 1939 whose depiction of the crude standards of sanitation and hygiene in rural Scotland revolutionised social welfare in the country. Andrew and I have been friends since I bought the shop, and I’m curious to see how he writes, and to se
e what use he made of a letter that his father wrote to one of his readers that I found in a book and gave to him as part of his research material.
Till total £233
15 customers
MONDAY, 3 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 7
Books found: 7
Five orders from AbeBooks, two from Amazon.
One postcard in the mail today: ‘The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.’ It had a local postmark. Kate the postie dropped off a ticket from Royal Mail telling me that there is an item for which no postage had been paid. It is in the sorting office in Newton Stewart. I will collect it tomorrow.
Callum came in to rebuild the counter area. We are going to incorporate an oak gantry that I bought at a farm sale on the Buccleuch estate about ten years ago. It is intended to form a more substantial barrier to protect me from customers.
A man in his thirties with a luxuriant beard came in and asked if we would be interested in 2,000 books he has in a farmhouse outside Newton Stewart. I said that we would; he will be in touch soon. Just as he left, another customer asked, ‘Do you have a toilet in here?’ I told him that we don’t, but that there’s one in the town hall, just at the end of the square. Customer: ‘Oh, that’s very disappointing. And it’s raining outside.’
Till total £238
15 customers
TUESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 5
Callum came in again at 9 a.m. to continue with fitting the gantry. He had to dismantle some of yesterday’s work to get the plaster-board in.
Eliot arrived at 9 p.m. for a board meeting later this week. I lit the fire, which he sat in front of, complaining about how cold it was. Presumably that’s the reason he didn’t kick his shoes off the moment he arrived in the kitchen, as he normally does.