The Diary of a Bookseller
Page 23
Till total £82.50
8 customers
WEDNESDAY, 5 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Awoke at 6.30 a.m. to the sound of doors slamming and stomping feet, then I remembered that Eliot is staying, so went back to sleep. Finally got up at 8.30 a.m. to brush my teeth, to find that Eliot was having a bath, so I went downstairs to make some breakfast. His clothes were all over the kitchen floor. I made a cup of tea and went into the big room to find the evidence of his breakfast all over the table – plates, mugs, cutlery, crumbs. He had also managed to shut the cat in there. He doesn’t consciously do these things, and I am quite sure it is because his mind is awash with the information that he will have to present to the board at the meeting.
This afternoon Mrs Phillips telephoned (‘I am ninety-three and blind’), looking for a copy of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. We had a copy in stock. Helen Macdonald was one of the speakers at this year’s festival, and hers was one of the most popular events.
Callum was in after lunch to continue work on the counter. As he was underneath it, he was startled by a voice saying ‘Hello’ and – temporarily distracted – let go of the hammer at a vital moment, sending it crashing through a pane of glass. The guilty party was Mr Deacon, who was in to order a copy of Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate – ‘Not for me, that sort of thing. Present for my daughter. Don’t read fiction. It’s largely written for women.’ We had a copy on the shelf, so I didn’t have to order it for him.
Very quiet in the shop. Not a single customer after 11.45 a.m., apart from Mr Deacon. The day was saved by an online order for the two-volume set of Don Quixote I bought on 15 August from the cottage in Haugh of Urr. It made £400 and sold to a customer in Japan.
Till total £152.50
5 customers
THURSDAY, 6 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
No postcards today.
Nicky has asked if she can have my Facebook password so that she can update the thousand or so people who follow the status updates from her perspective. She has also told me that there is a bit of the new counter area that Callum has built that she doesn’t like and she’s going to remove it the next time I’m away. As always, there was a complete absence of any rational explanation as to why she has taken exception to that particular bit of the counter: ‘I just dinnae like it.’
The winner of last week’s anonymous postcard competition (the prize is a book of their choice, value up to £20) was from London, and the card read: ‘“Do you know Yeats? The wine lodge? No, W. B. Yeats, the poet…” and so to assonance, getting the rhyme wrong.’ Apparently it is a quotation from Willy Russell, who came to the book festival a few years ago.
Isabel came in to do the accounts. She was very taken with the new book spirals.
I reached the point in Andrew McNeillie’s biography of his father in which he quotes from the letter I gave him. My surname is often spelled incorrectly, but Andrew’s interpretation of it is very unusual: ‘Bithyll’.
Till total £88
5 customers
FRIDAY, 7 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
A significant number of customers recently have been asking for Terry Pratchett novels. His sad decline with Alzheimer’s may well have something to do with it. Pratchett, like John Buchan, P. G. Wodehouse, E. F. Benson and many others, is an author whose books I can never find enough of. They sell quickly and usually in large numbers. In one day last year we sold our entire Penguin Wodehouse section of over twenty books, all bought by three customers.
Till total £198.77
15 customers
SATURDAY, 8 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Reasonably busy day – spent much of it reading Andrew McNeillie’s biography of his father, Ian Niall: Part of His Life. Ian Niall was John McNeillie’s nom de plume, and the title is a reference to his father’s most famous work, The Wigtown Ploughman: Part of His Life.
Till total £132.83
17 customers
MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
A customer at 11.15 a.m. asked for a copy of Far from the Maddening Crowd. In spite of several attempts to explain that the book’s title is actually Far from the Madding Crowd, he resolutely refused to accept that this was the case, even when the overwhelming evidence of a copy of it was placed on the counter under his nose: ‘Well, the printers have got that wrong.’
Despite the infuriating nature of this exchange, I ought to be grateful: he has given me an idea for the title of my autobiography should I ever be fortunate enough to retire.
I have stapled the anonymous postcards along one of the shelves in the gallery, the room in the middle of the shop that used to be used for hanging paintings in the time when John Carter owned the place. We still call it the gallery, despite the fact that there isn’t a single painting there. Similarly, there is a pub in Wigtown which for a hundred years at least was known as The County Hotel. When it was taken over about six years ago, the new owners changed the name to The Wigtown Ploughman. Locals still refer to it as The County, and I suspect they always will.
Till total £57.99
6 customers
TUESDAY, 11 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
I am rapidly running out of space for the anonymous postcards and may have to start stapling them to Nicky.
A customer came to the counter with Highways and Byways in Galloway and Carrick, by C. H. Dick, published in 1916 and bound in blue buckram with gilt titles. This copy was in fine condition and priced at £16.50. When I asked her for the money, the customer – an elderly, well-spoken woman – spat ‘£16.50? That’s daylight robbery, I am not paying that for an old book.’ I followed her to the door and watched as she got into her brand-new Range Rover and drove off.
Highways and Byways is a truly wonderful glimpse of the area a hundred years ago. Surprisingly little has changed around here since then. Particularly the fact that – as Dick observed – the ‘district has remained unknown to the world longer than any other part of Scotland, with the possible exception of the island of Rockall’.
Till total £125.03
7 customers
WEDNESDAY, 12 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
One of the online orders was for the Penguin edition of Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, a book I hadn’t even realised we had in stock.
Just before lunch a customer brought in four boxes of grubby trashy fiction. I fished out a few and offered him £15 for them. He proceeded to complain that £15 wouldn’t even cover the cost of the petrol he used to drive here with them. When I pointed out that I neither asked him to bring them here nor even knew that he was going to, he continued to complain until he finally left, muttering that he had a large library of rare antiquarian books that he ‘most certainly won’t be bringing to this establishment to sell’.
Winter is really setting in, and the shop is noticeably colder than it was a few weeks ago, despite the heating being on and the stove in the shop having been lit every day since the start of October.
Till total £67.95
7 customers
THURSDAY, 13 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 4
Books found: 2
Ran down the stairs at 8.55 a.m. to answer the telephone, which had been ringing for a while. En route I managed to spill tea all over my crotch. I reached the telephone to be asked, ‘Do you know what time the next bus for Wigtown leaves Newton Stewart?’
Wrote grovelling apologies to the two Amazon customers whose orders I couldn’t find, in the hope of avoiding negative feedback.
As I was attempting to put up a poster up in the shop for the Random Book Club, I noticed that the staple gun didn’t appear to be working, so I tested it on my h
and, at which point it decided to work.
Till total £34.50
3 customers
FRIDAY, 14 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 4
Books found: 3
Nicky arrived, bright and early with some hideous flapjacks from the Morrisons skip. She hijacked Facebook and posted the following:
Todays Offers!
Always wanted that copy of ‘The Fly-Fisher’s Entomology’ with it’s hand coloured Marlow Buzz, Little Yellow May Dun etc but you just did not have £70 to spare – well this weekend it could be yours! Let’s BARTER!
Firewood, whisky, hens, piebald cobs all taken in part exchange! Bring ’em in!
A small boy, probably five years old, came in on his own and asked if we could help him find a birthday present for his mother. He had £4. On inquiring, we discovered that she likes gardening, so we found him a book on container gardening priced at £6. Nicky let him have it for £4.
After lunch I drove to Rhonehouse, near Castle Douglas, to look at a book collection that a retired Church of Scotland minister’s widow was selling. I arrived at 2 p.m. and met her and her son, a man a few years younger than I am who had moved back from Edinburgh to help look after her in old age. She made us all a cup of tea, then showed me to the dining room, in which she had laid out all the books – spine up – on the dining table. As she was discussing them she produced an extremely loud whistling fart, which she sustained over a period of several seconds. Shortly afterwards she left and wandered off into the garden, at which point her son entered the room, clearly detected the fart and shot me the filthiest of looks.
I left with four boxes of crusty theology and a reputation for flatulence.
Till total £105.90
11 customers
SATURDAY, 15 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Nicky stayed overnight and opened the shop this morning.
First telephone call of the day:
Caller: ‘I am just calling to confirm your advertisement in Crime Prevention Publication. We’ve got you down for a quarter-page advert. You agreed to it when you signed up back in August’, followed by some unconvincing flannel about circulation and readership etc.
Me: ‘I don’t remember any such conversation, and I would never advertise in anything called Crime Prevention Publication. It sounds like you’ve just made it up.’
Caller: ‘But you agreed, back in August; it’s all written down here.’
Me: ‘I don’t think so. What’s your number and I’ll check and call you back?’
They hung up.
Oh, the irony. Crime Prevention Publication scam. This sort of call happens about twice a year. Quite often the publication I have supposedly agreed to sponsor will be called something like Be Nice to Sick Children.
Till total £145.98
20 customers
MONDAY, 17 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Nicky came in today. I drove to Lockerbie and took the train to Edinburgh for a meeting at the National Library of Scotland to discuss the possibility of using their out-of-copyright classical recordings to set up a radio station to which businesses could pay a small subscription and avoid the punitive fees imposed by PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited) and the PRS (Performing Right Society), two organisations whose raison d’être appears to be to extract money from anyone who plays recorded music in the workplace. On the train I was sitting next to a group of people, one of whom had a Kindle. He spent an hour lecturing his slackjawed companions about the wonder of the bloody thing at considerable volume while the rest of us attempted in vain to read books, magazines and newspapers. Eventually – and with no sense of irony – he barked. ‘Of course, I can’t possibly read if someone in the room is talking.’ Every head in the carriage simultaneously snapped towards him in a collective scowl.
Today’s Facebook post from Nicky:
Very harassed yesterday – sent lots of our best stock off to a new customer in Germany, shelves are looking empty!
Customer of the day had to be the woman, along with her adult daughter, who handled most of our lovely antiquarian stock & dropped one on the floor, snapping off the leather boards. Then when she asked did we have any Steinbeck books (‘yes, we do’, big smile, customer is always right) sneezed ALL OVER ME.
No, she did not buy anything.
I spent the night in Edinburgh with my sister Lulu and her family.
Till total £170.99
14 customers
TUESDAY, 18 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Left Edinburgh at 10 a.m. Nicky was in the shop, and I’d asked her if she would mind packing the books for the Random Book Club. Arrived home just after lunchtime, and to my surprise she had done it and had organised the postman to collect the seven sacks.
As I was sorting through boxes, I found an old guide to Wigtownshire which contained an advert for the shop when it was a grocer’s in the 1950s. Occasionally a visitor to the shop will drop in to tell me that the shop was Pauling’s, the grocer, when they lived in Wigtown, or that they were related to the people who ran it when it was a grocer’s shop.
Till total £90.50
5 customers
WEDNESDAY, 19 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 5
Books found: 3
At 11 a.m. a teenage boy shuffled awkwardly to the counter and placed a paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye in front of me, with the £2.50 change required to pay for it. Few books have affected me the way that book did when I was around the same age as that boy, and going through the tortuous transition into adulthood. Salinger’s portrayal of Holden Caulfield’s disengagement with the world in which he is forced to live must have resonated with millions of teenage readers over the decades since its first publication in 1951.
Till total £48
9 customers
THURSDAY, 20 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky came in and carried on listing the books from the Rhonehouse deal. It is now one month since the 5p bag tax was introduced, and Nicky has calculated that the number of people asking for one has gone from about 50 per cent to under 10 per cent.
Till total £149
10 customers
FRIDAY, 21 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Nicky has taken to hijacking Facebook regularly now. Here is her post for today:
The customers were complaining of the HEAT yesterday when we lit the stove & burned the books we did not like, I mean, did not want, i.e. those without proper ‘speechmarks’ so – no more Roddy Doyle or Irvine Welsh – what a shame!
Would you like to nominate any books for burning today?
Today’s Foodie Friday treat was a packet of out-of-date oatcakes.
Mr Deacon came in to order a book but couldn’t find the scrap of paper he had written it down on.
In a moment of boredom I worked out that we have posted out over a ton of books this year. No wonder I have to sit down before opening the Royal Mail invoice.
Till total £57.30
5 customers
SATURDAY, 22 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 1
Nicky was in, so I went for lunch in the Steam Packet in the Isle of Whithorn with some friends. I returned in the middle of the afternoon to discover that she had taken it upon herself to wallpaper the section of wall near the children’s section with illustrations of wild animals she had cut out from an encyclopaedia.
I despair. She is a law unto herself.
Mr Deacon telephoned. He wants a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. When I reminded him that he had told me that fiction was for women, he replied, ‘Most of it, but not all of it.’
A customer who had driven down from Ayr brought in two boxes of books to sell. Mostly Victorian guidebooks to Europe, but not in very good co
ndition. She had bought them at an auction by accident, thinking she was bidding on a samovar. I gave her £200, which she assured me gave her enough profit to have made the journey worthwhile.
Nicky, on leaving at the end of the working day: ‘I’ve got a great idea, why don’t we turn the shop into a disco?’
Till total £345.99
19 customers
MONDAY, 24 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 5
Books found: 4
Yesterday I had the slightly unsettling experience of waking up after a lie-in, going downstairs to the kitchen, making myself a cup of tea and wandering into the sitting room with my dressing gown a-flap to encounter the window cleaner staring into the room from his ladder. I beat a hasty retreat. Neither of us spoke of it this morning when he dropped in to collect his £5.
A customer came to the counter with a book on Scottish history, leather-bound, dated 1817. He pointed at a price marked in pencil on the endpaper of £1.50, which was clearly not our price. I checked on our database and we had it priced at £75, and our copy was the cheapest online. I told him that there was no way he could have it for £1.50, and he stormed out. Nicky later told me that she had seen him writing something in a book in the shop and suspected that he had removed our sticker and written the price in himself. Years ago there was a notorious book dealer who would regularly trawl the bookshops of Wigtown, waiting until he saw a fresh face at the counter – someone who he suspected knew less than he did – and erase pencil prices in rare books and reduce them to steal himself a bargain. As far as I know, he is now dead.