Till Total £32
4 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 21 JANUARY
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 1
Another cold day.
At 1.30 p.m. Emily, the young artist who leases the warehouse at the back of the shop, turned up with the rent for her studio. Nice to have someone finally giving me money, rather than vice versa.
Found a book teaching Germans how to speak English, Der perfecte Englander, which included the following:
‘Well, Sir, if you have done supping, please to stay yet a little and favour us with some anecdotes.’ [You would NEVER invite a stranger to bore you with anecdotes after you’ve worked in a bookshop for a while.]
‘You must observe a strict diet and perspire a good deal. Take, therefore, some cups of elder-tea.’
‘My stock of stuffs for pantaloons is well assorted this season.’
‘You are very punctual. I wish to be measured for an overcoat.’
‘Tell her to wash my shirt and stockings better than the last time.’
Drove to Newton Stewart for a 3.30 p.m. appointment with Peter, a solicitor, to write my will. As soon as I left, I felt an abrupt sense of my own mortality – and wondered whether not having written a formal will with a solicitor was contributing towards keeping me alive.
Lit the fire and finished reading Miss Lonelyhearts. Brilliantly funny, dark and tragic, and, for a book published in 1933, surprisingly modern. I don’t think I’ve laughed out loud at a book quite as much as when I read the letters that Miss Lonelyhearts (a disillusioned, hard-drinking male journalist) receives from his readers.
Till Total £33
2 Customers
THURSDAY, 22 JANUARY
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 1
Sorting through some boxes of books that have piled up in the shop today, I found a piece of paper in a copy of Catriona, Stevenson’s sequel to Kidnapped, published by Cassell in 1895. On the paper was a pencil caricature of a woman. On the back – also in pencil – was a message saying that the sketch was of Queen Victoria, and was executed by Lawrence Alma-Tadema in 1900, the year before Victoria’s death. Knowing nothing about Alma-Tadema, I found a book about Victorian artists among the art section and looked him up. He was Dutch but settled in England in 1870. He was a fine painter, mainly of scenes of classical subjects, and I’m rather embarrassed not to have heard of him. In any case, the date of the book, the quality of the paper and the subsequent deterioration in condition appear to confirm the message’s veracity. I’ve put it on eBay.
Busy day in the shop: two French couples – none of whom appeared to speak a word of English – bought £40 worth of books, all in English.
Till Total £235
4 Customers
FRIDAY, 23 JANUARY
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Sunny morning, but I fired up the gas heater in the big room anyway and moved the stereo in for Petra’s dance class. Five people turned up, including Gina, the Kiwi woman who’s working in one of the cafés.
Nicky arrived on time, with a wide-eyed look of excitement on her face – ‘You won’t believe what I’ve got for you.’ In nervous terror I guessed that it might be a ‘Foodie Friday’ treat. (Every Thursday night, after her Jehovah’s Witness meeting at Kingdom Hall, Nicky scavenges the supermarket discount shelves in Stranraer.) With undisguised delight she replied, ‘You’re RIGHT’, before pulling from the pockets of the brown overcoat that she occasionally wears over her ski suit – like a Midwestern gunslinger – two bottles of some alarmingly synthetic-looking beer that she’d found reduced in Lidl.
While they were all thumping around upstairs, I processed the mailing for the Random Book Club, then drove to Newton Stewart to drop the mail sacks off at the sorting office. On the way back the road was blocked on the straight section at Baltersan farm by the dairy herd crossing. I usually try to avoid travelling at this time of day as at around 3 p.m. the cows are moved across the road from the field where they graze to the dairy for milking.
Till Total £85.99
3 Customers
SATURDAY, 24 JANUARY
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Twenty minutes late opening the shop – forgot to set the alarm last night. Fortunately Nicky was here on time to open up, and justifiably berated me for my idleness when I appeared, bleary-eyed and shoeless.
Old friends the brothers Robin and Bernard dropped round at about 11 a.m. and bought some books. Robin always buys books about history and cricket. Bernard is someone I haven’t seen for a while. He surprised me by buying several books about the American Civil War, in which it appears he has a keen interest.
One of today’s customers – a man in a deerstalker – came in and out of the shop six times in the space of an hour. He didn’t buy anything.
Cold day, and it looked like snow was coming, so I told Nicky that she could leave at 4.30.
Till Total £134
14 Customers
MONDAY, 26 JANUARY
Online orders: 7
Orders found: 6
Among the orders this morning was one for Bellenden’s two-volume The History and Chronicles of Scotland – £225 to a customer in Canada. A good number of the books on Scottish history we list online seem to end up in Canada.
At 9.45 a customer came to the counter and said, ‘Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck. First editions. Where?’
When I took today’s orders over to the post office, I made a point of saying an effusively friendly ‘Hello’ to William, who reluctantly reciprocated with an obviously grudging reply. His previously benevolent mood has clearly abandoned him.
Customer: ‘I’m looking for a copy of The History of Rutherglen and East Kilbride, and a copy of the first Statistical Account of Scotland.’ We have both in stock, at reasonable prices. He bought neither.
Tonight was Burns Night, so I closed the shop early and went to the co-op to buy haggis, turnip and potatoes, and a bottle of whisky for Burns supper. Carol-Ann came round with haggis pakoras. She drew the line at drinking whisky, but I had a couple of large glasses of Laphroaig.
Till Total £133.49
8 Customers
TUESDAY, 27 JANUARY
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 2
The wild wind repeatedly blew the door open throughout the day, so I removed the lock plate so that the latch could keep the door closed.
At 10.30 a.m. Callum delivered twelve bags of logs, which should see me through the next three weeks.
An elderly man with a walking stick bought £40 worth of books on a range of subjects. As he was paying, he showed me his stick, which was made from a snooker cue with a snooker ball mounted to the top of it as a handle. He told me that he had come down from Edinburgh to visit his brother, who is convalescing in Newton Stewart hospital. During our lengthy chat he told me that he’d been down two weeks ago to bury his friend Lord Devaird. I was slightly shocked to hear that he’d died, as he was a regular customer, a quiet man with diverse reading tastes. It’s often only when someone tells you that one of your regular customers has died that you realise you haven’t seen them for some time.
Isabel came in to do the accounts. She couldn’t decipher any of the handwriting on my cheque stubs and, to be fair, I struggled to too. Lambing starts next week, so I’ll probably see her less frequently now until that’s over.
Till Total £60
5 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 28 JANUARY
Online orders: 6
Orders found: 6
All of today’s orders were from Amazon; none from Abe.
Clear day with bitter showers. The wind has died down considerably though.
As I was pricing books up, I found a bookplate in an early set of Dickens with the name Fanny Strutt on it. For some reason I imagined the Fanny Strutt being a 1950s American dance craze.
Till Total £21
&nbs
p; 2 Customers
THURSDAY, 29 JANUARY
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 4
Wet, dull day. The sort that causes me to question why I have chosen to live here.
The Alma-Tadema sketch that I found in the copy of Catriona last week sold for £145, about five times what I was expecting. Such is the peculiar way of the second-hand book trade that a scrap of paper found in a 120-year-old book can prove to be worth more than the book itself.
As I was going through the boxes of books from the widow in Ayr (four flights of stairs), I found a pilot’s log-book from 1938 and a QE2 wardroom song book so, following the success of the last RAF notebook, I decided to list them on eBay and googled the name of the pilot in the log-book to see whether he was significant enough to add value to it. His name was John William Mott, and he had been an engineer on HMS Exeter when it had attacked the Graf Spee in 1939. The Exeter suffered extensive damage and – without any serviceable guns – the captain ordered Mott to steam up and ram the enemy vessel. Luckily for all on board, the Graf Spee turned and steamed off towards Montevideo. Mott then managed to guide the vessel to the Falkland Islands and safety. His obituary was in the Independent, and makes fascinating reading. He oversaw the construction of the QE2, and later went on to manage Culzean Castle, a National Trust property near Ayr, which is where his widow retired following his death.
After work I went for a pint with Callum at the Brig End – a pub down by the River Bladnoch about a mile from Wigtown. We’re both invited to Tom and Willeke’s for supper tomorrow. Callum is going to drive there, and we’ll share a taxi home.
Till Total £49.50
3 Customers
FRIDAY, 30 JANUARY
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Nicky arrived at 8.55 a.m., just as I was switching the lights on. ‘Eh, you’re up early’ was her greeting – fair enough after my lie-in last Saturday. She told me that – despite an extensive search – there was nothing worthy of Foodie Friday in the discount area of Morrisons last night. Considering how low the bar is for Foodie Friday, there must have been nothing but out-of-date dog food in the Morrisons’ discount area.
After we’d picked the orders, I dropped off the mail at the post office at eleven o’clock. William studiously ignored me. Perhaps he’s embarrassed about his uncharacteristic friendliness of the week before last.
Shortly before five o’clock a customer asked Nicky, ‘I’m looking for a book. I don’t know what it’s called but I read it in school and it was about a koala that keeps stealing jam. Do you have it?’ Nicky laughed, pointed at me and said, ‘Ask him, I’m away home.’ Shortly afterwards, a customer appeared with six boxes of antiquarian books that he told me he’d inherited from his great aunt. I could see Nicky’s interest was piqued, and it was obvious that she wanted to stay and rake through them. I don’t think it’s possible – once you’ve worked in the second-hand book trade – to hear from someone that they’ve got six boxes of antiquarian books and not want to go through them immediately and see what they are, but Nicky has clearly decided that she’d had enough for the day and headed out the door to Bluebottle, her skip of a van.
Callum, Anna and I went to Tom and Willeke’s for supper, which turned out to be an extremely entertaining night. Tom and Willeke are more or less self-sufficient when it comes to food, so everything we ate was grown and cooked by Tom. Home at 2.30 a.m.
Till Total £85.50
5 Customers
SATURDAY, 31 JANUARY
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
I was an hour late opening the shop. Within five minutes of opening the door, the shop was full. Perhaps this is the secret: inconsistency with opening hours.
Order for book called Moles and Their Control.
Callum appeared at 12.30 p.m. and wandered off towards a friend’s house, where he thought he might be able to blag a free breakfast.
I dropped off the mail at the post office and picked up a copy of The Guardian. I’ve started to question whether the only reason I buy The Guardian is to outrage William’s right-wing sensibilities. Every time I buy it, he returns my change, muttering something about woolly liberals, or champagne socialists.
At one o’clock a woman came in with a bag of books, among which was a copy of Ludovic Kennedy’s In Bed with an Elephant that she’d bought in the shop eight years ago. She made a great fuss about the fact that it had been signed by him. When I checked the dedication on the title page, it read: ‘For David and Rosemary with best wishes, Ludovic Kennedy.’ David and Rosemary are my parents. He must have given them the book when he was here for the book festival several years ago. They must have given it to John, the previous owner, once they’d read it, and now it has come almost full circle.
Till Total £74
8 Customers
FEBRUARY
About 200 new books are published per week. It’s an awful thought. A body would need a deep purse to buy everything he would like to read. The fact is, he doesn’t buy. He borrows from a library.
This is the age of circulating libraries. Never before have they done such a thumping trade. I cannot agree with those who say in a deep voice that a book is not worth reading if it isn’t worth reading again. I could complete a fat catalogue of the books that are worth reading once only. This is where the public or the private subscription library comes in. Besides, if a man would like to buy a new book, but would prefer to make quite sure of it before he pays good money, he can have a quiet keek through a library copy. I whiles hear folk on the harangue about circulating libraries, and they expect me to agree because I’m a second-hand bookseller. But only a dolt would try to batter down such a useful institution.
Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller
From time to time we will come across a small, cheaply produced copy of a book with a sticker – usually on the front – which says ‘Boots Library’ or, more rarely, ‘Mudies Library’. They are usually worthless and go into the recycling, or to the charity shop, but these are the ‘circulating’ or lending libraries to which Baxter refers. Today is no longer ‘the age of circulating libraries’, nor indeed of libraries of any sort. Prior to technological innovations at the end of the nineteenth century that enabled paper, and thus books, to be produced more cheaply, they were an expensive luxury, and only available to the relatively wealthy, and so sprung into existence the circulating library, a service by which – either through subscription or a daily charge – the less wealthy could have access to books. They were commercial enterprises, and enormously popular. Publishers and authors benefited too, as they received a share of the revenue. Their demise came in three waves: first, the reduced cost of books in the early twentieth century; then the advent of the paperback; and finally, the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act, which imposed a duty on local authorities to provide free lending libraries. Boots, the chemist, closed its circulating library in 1966. Scotland’s oldest free lending library is Innerpeffray Library, near Crieff, which has been lending books to the public since 1680. I share John Baxter’s respect for libraries for similar reasons – if someone reads and enjoys a library book, there’s every chance that they’ll want to own a copy of that book, so once it has been returned to the library, it’s likely that they’ll buy a copy. I can’t see that libraries could have a significantly negative impact on bookshops. If anything, the reverse. The same argument has been made about e-readers, but I’m not so sure about that.
Baxter would doubtless be astonished to discover that last year in the UK, roughly 3,500 titles were published per week. Arguably this could have a negative impact on the publishing industry – overloading the public with too many titles will inevitably drive down the numbers of an individual title’s sales figures – but I suppose it is to be celebrated that so much is being published and, hopefully, read.
MONDAY, 2 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 1
Callum came in at 10 a.m. to have a look at the leak in the shop window. During the storms the place was awash from the driving rain.
The wind picked up throughout the day until it became so bad that the Met Office probably ought to have dignified it with a name.
Colette, who’s working at The Open Book, dropped in to introduce herself. She’s in for a quiet week. I often feel sorry for those who come to run it in December, January and February. If my takings are anything to go by, they’ll be lucky to see more than a handful of shivering souls.
Till Total £54.49
3 Customers
TUESDAY, 3 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 8
Orders found: 8
After the storm, a sunny day.
Tom turned up at lunchtime to borrow my shop accounts over the past ten years so that he could produce an analysis of how the credit crunch and the growth of Amazon have affected local retail. It’s part of his pitch to raise funds for the Writers’ House project.
Sarah from Craigard Gallery (three doors down the street) dropped in two belated Christmas cards, one for Nicky and one for me. Nicky’s says, ‘Queen of Awesomeness’. Mine says, ‘Bah! Humbug!’
The majority of the day was occupied with trying to hammer together the programme for the Spring Festival; a weekend of talks and events organised by the booksellers of Wigtown over the May Bank Holiday.
Closed the shop and went to The Open Book and invited Colette over for supper. She told me that she’d had a great night at the Bladnoch Inn last night, and been the focus of the amorous attention of many of the customers – a large number of whom are farmers who live in rugged isolation.
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 3