Confessions of a Bookseller
Page 7
Today was a warm, sunny day, and shortly before lunchtime a butterfly started to fly around the shop.
Till Total £163.50
8 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 11 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Opened the shop to the sound of rain dripping into the window display once again. Buckets etc. in place. Kate the postie delivered the mail, which included a fine and penalty points from Strathclyde Police for jumping a red light in Glasgow last week in my quest for a pair of shutters for Nicky.
That brings me up to ten points. When I first got the new van last year I was unduly thrilled that it had a built-in satnav that provided an estimated time of arrival for journeys. So much so, that to alleviate the boredom of long drives to buy books from distant houses, I used to play ‘beat-the-satnav’ and see how many minutes I could shave off the ETA. This had the unfortunate – but entirely predictable – consequence that I was caught speeding three times. I’ve had to stop now.
Till Total £134.49
12 Customers
THURSDAY, 12 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
More torrential rain. The buckets in the window are slowly filling up.
A customer accosted me as I was tidying up the history section, and said, ‘I was in here two years ago and you had a book by Roger Penrose. Do you know what happened to it?’ There are 100,000 books in the shop, and we probably sell 20,000 books a year. Including rotated stock, books that customers dump on us and the books we’ve sold over the past fifteen years, I estimate that I must have handled close to a million books. I don’t remember Roger Penrose’s book.
Telephone call from Anna in the evening. She’s clearly missing Wigtown. We reminisced about the time we went to visit her grandmother in a retirement home in Baltimore and she insisted on taking us out for lunch. Many of the residents there still drove, but with increasingly failing memories and eyesight they often had trouble finding their cars in the home’s car park, so when one of them had the bright idea of attaching a plastic toy to the aerial of their car, the others all did the same. It remains one of the strangest sights I’ve seen; a car park in which every vehicle’s aerial was decorated with some sort of child’s toy.
Frieda (Bubeh), Anna’s maternal grandmother, never lost her Polish accent, even after sixty years in America, she still sounded as though she’d just stepped off the boat with her husband, Max. Both Jewish, they’d survived the war and the Nazi scourge against considerable odds. Bubeh, aged thirteen when the Nazis invaded her small town in rural Poland and rounded up the Jews, had escaped with her sister and spent most of the war on the run, dependent on the kindness of the best of humanity and exposed to the cruelty and vindictiveness of the worst. She ended the war in a work camp before being liberated.
Max, Anna’s grandfather, was transported to Auschwitz with his first wife and their two sons. He was separated from them on arrival. He never saw them again. Anna – although she is doubtless unaware of it – bears the legacy of it: sharp shards of sadness occasionally puncture her otherwise eternally optimistic disposition. I see it whenever I look at her, but I wonder if that’s just my own sadness for her family’s past manifesting itself. Primo Levi, who, along with Anna’s grandfather and a few other fortunate souls, survived the concentration camps, witnessed the unbelieving stares of the Soviet liberators who cut the wires of the camp on 27 January 1945. He wrote in The Drowned and the Saved: ‘Until 1944 there were no children in Auschwitz; they were all killed by gas on arrival. After this date, there began to arrive entire families of Poles arrested at random during the Warsaw insurrection: all of them were tattooed, including new-born babies.’ Max’s children were aged five and seven, just two of the million estimated to have been killed in Auschwitz.
My maternal grandparents, by contrast, spent the war in rural Ireland, a country so recently freed from the shackles of British dominion that it couldn’t even bring itself to recognise the conflict in Europe as a war, preferring instead to refer to it as ‘The Emergency’. While hardly living in luxury, they were – at least – in no danger of being executed for who they were.
Till Total £155
10 Customers
FRIDAY, 13 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Alarmingly, Nicky was in on the dot of 9 a.m. I had to check my watch three times to make sure it hadn’t stopped. Shortly afterwards, Jeff the minister dropped in to trawl through the theology section. He often does this, and inevitably makes disparaging comments about my stock. Nicky’s hackles rise when he comes in, but thankfully Jeff is blissfully oblivious to her particular religious predilections.
One good sale today: £220 for two early beautiful leather-bound editions of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They weren’t the more valuable first editions, but they certainly weren’t cold on their heels.
As I was going through some boxes of fresh stock, I discovered another RAF observer’s log-book from the Second World War. I’ll put it on eBay. It won’t sell in the shop. These more unusual things tend to disappear into the shelves when they’re in the shop, but online they seem to stand out and realise decent prices.
I recently had a copy of The Little Grey Men, by BB, published in 1942. On the verso (left-hand page, when you’re looking at an open book) of the half-title is a crest that reads ‘BOOK PRODUCTION WAR ECONOMY STANDARD’. I think the first time I saw this was on a first edition of The 39 Steps, published in 1915, although I may be wrong about that. Certainly, the production values of The 39 Steps were not high. The War Economy Standard came into force because of the need to prioritise resources for the war effort, so publishers were forced to cut their paper consumption by 60 per cent, and print size, blank pages, words per page etc. were dictated by the Ministry of Supply. Most books published between 1942 and 1949 will bear the compliance stamp on one of the preliminary pages.
The War Economy Standard is also responsible for a legend in the world of publishing. Pan Books came into existence in part because of the regulations: the rigours and demands of the war meant that cheap paperbacks were more compliant than heavy hardbacks. Pan commissioned Mervyn Peake to design a logo for them, which he duly did – the iconic silhouette of Pan playing the pipes. They offered him two options: a one-off payment of £10 or a percentage of every book sold under the Pan imprint. Graham Greene advised him to take the £10 because he believed that ‘the paperback book was just a temporary solution to the paper shortage’. He took Greene’s advice, which, it turns out, was a costly mistake.
Denys Watkins-Pitchford wrote and illustrated many natural history books under the pseudonym BB (the size of the shot in a shotgun cartridge used for shooting geese). His books – or, at least, some of them – are highly sought after by collectors, and even for people not interested in the subject matter his writing is engaging and, at times, exquisite. One of my earliest reading memories is of being entranced by a story he wrote for children called The Pool of the Black Witch. I couldn’t put it down, and the picture he painted with words is still clear today, thirty-five years later. The landscape, the tension and excitement were so rich and real that perhaps, more than anything, that book taught me the joy that reading can bring.
Nicky stayed the night.
Till Total £366.50
9 Customers
SATURDAY, 14 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Nicky and I had breakfast together, then she opened the shop, so I went back to bed for an hour.
After lunch there was a telephone call from Maria (who takes care of the catering in the Writers’ Retreat during the festival) in as much of a panic as she ever gets (a mild fluster) to ask if she could use the shop as a venue for her pop-up restaurant, the Galloway Supper Club. Apparently the place she had lined up had double-booked so she can’t use it. I happil
y agreed to let her use the shop. The event is next Friday night.
After lunch a customer – an elderly woman – was tutting loudly and complaining in the orange Penguin section of the shop, so I asked her if there was a problem. She embarked on a lengthy complaint about the fact that some of the titles on the spines read from bottom to top, and some from top to bottom, so she kept having to tilt her head in different directions, and told me that I should arrange them all so that the titles could be read from top to bottom. This would mean putting quite a few of them upside down, and since she’s the only person ever to have made this complaint, I told her that I wasn’t prepared to indulge her request.
As far as I’m aware, there is no convention in the world of publishing as to whether spine titles read in a particular direction. On the whole, they tend to read from top to bottom, with the publisher’s name or logo at the base of the spine, but plenty of them read the other way. The only convention seems to be that the publisher’s logo appears at the bottom.
Before she left, Nicky gave me a small booklet called What Does the Bible Really Teach? Apparently it’s standard issue for Jehovah’s Witnesses when they’re doorstepping people. Her parting words were, ‘Right, you. I want you to read two paragraphs of that every week. And I’ll be testing you next time I see you.’
After she’d gone, I took advantage of the ever-lengthening days and went for a walk down along the old railway line. It’s a pretty walk, even from the shop down to the bottom of the hill, past the row of Georgian houses on the sloping Bank Street, then the ruined Norman church with its view south down across the frequently flooded fields, and after that along the railway line, with the salt marsh to the left, heavily populated with thousands of geese at this time of year, waiting for their breeding grounds in Greenland and Iceland to thaw before they migrate north again.
Till Total £165.50
12 Customers
SUNDAY, 15 MARCH
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Phoned Nicky in the morning about searching for a lost ruin near her house. I met her at Whitefield Loch, and we scrambled around looking for the remains of what was once a beautiful Scottish Baronial castle. The house has been totally destroyed apart from part of a wall. She then took me to a beautiful Arts and Crafts house nearby which someone is clearly restoring. When I asked her how she knew about it, she replied, ‘One of the perks of being a Witness’.
Afterwards we drove to Knock Fell, the highest point on the peninsula, to look for a chapel which Nicky was convinced would be in good condition. I assured her that it would be no more than a pile of stones. I managed to get the van stuck and had to walk to the nearby farm to seek help. By the time I returned with the farmer’s wife in her 4×4 Nicky had found a sheep’s skull, which she was proudly displaying on the bumper of the van. After a bit of an effort we managed to get out and head home.
MONDAY, 16 MARCH
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 1
Only found one of the orders. One of those unlocated was a 1970s Highland Region winter bus timetable.
The first customers of the week were a German couple who bought £37 worth of cookery books, mainly by Jamie Oliver.
An American customer came to the counter at 4 p.m. and asked ‘Do you have any old maps?’
Me: Yes, how old?
Customer: Quite old. What’s your oldest book?
Me: At the moment it’s this one here. It was published in 1582.
Customer: Wow. That’s, like, 300 years old.
He was only out by 133 years.
This is the time of year when the River Cree, which flows through nearby Newton Stewart, sees its annual migration of sparling. These are small fish that come up the river with the tide (they’re notoriously bad swimmers – a bit of a bummer if you’re a fish) for a few hours, just once a year, to spawn. The Cree is the only river on the west coast of Scotland that still has a sparling population, and their appearance is one of the positive signs that we’re slowly creeping out of the long winter.
Till Total £179.05
14 Customers
TUESDAY, 17 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
It was a quiet morning, the peace broken at 11 a.m. by a middle-aged woman in a duffel coat who kept shouting at her husband:
Woman: Barry! … Barry! … Barry!
Barry: Yes dear?
Woman: Barry, have I read Nineteen Eighty-Four?’
Unsurprisingly, Barry wasn’t sure whether or not she had read it, so she decided not to blow £2.50 on a mint Penguin copy, just in case she had.
I listed the RAF observer’s log-book on eBay and noticed that the Colwyn Bay bookshop in Wales has clearly failed to sell their stock as a job lot on eBay again at the second attempt, and they’ve now split it into two smaller lots. Selling shop stock as a single lot is increasingly difficult, as every other dealer will assume that the best of the books have been removed.
Till Total £94.20
9 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 18 MARCH
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
By 12.30 p.m. the only person through the door was Kate (the postwoman) with today’s mail, which included a parcel for Anna, so the inevitable battle with barcode technology ensued until she eventually managed to scan it.
Spent much of the day packing the random books, mainly selected from the books bought from New Abbey a few weeks ago, which included a box of orange Penguins. Among them was the wonderfully titled The Breaking of Bumbo, by Andrew Sinclair.
At about 2 p.m. I needed to get my chequebook to pay a customer for some books that he’d brought in. I’d left it in the van. It was a sunny spring day, and the moment I opened the door of the van I was hit by a foul stench caused by the sheep’s skull that Nicky had left in the cab from our adventure on Sunday.
Till Total £44.50
3 Customers
THURSDAY, 19 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
I spent the morning stamping, labelling and bagging all the books for the Random Book Club, which currently has 176 subscribers.
No Nicky tomorrow, because she’s away at a Jehovah’s Witness convention this weekend, so I’ve booked Flo instead. I have two private book collections to look at tomorrow – one in Dumfries, one in Thornhill.
In the evening I set up the big room for Maria’s Galloway Supper Club tomorrow night. Twenty-three expected, and so far I’ve only been able to make space for twenty. I’ll do some furniture moving in the morning.
Till Total £131.95
8 Customers
FRIDAY, 20 MARCH
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Flo in at 9 a.m., uncharacteristically punctual for her. Nicky’s away at her Jehovah’s Witness convention.
I spent the day driving around, looking at the book collections.
The first was near Dumfries (50 miles away): a woman who had about a hundred books. I took about forty away and gave her £50, then on to Thornhill (40 miles away), to a beautiful old house. As I drove up the driveway, I could see an elderly man pushing a wheelbarrow, wearing a pair of what appeared to be tight black leather trousers. He and his wife are downsizing, and were utterly charming, keeping me supplied with a steady stream of tea and biscuits. The library contained a good collection of gardening books, including two eighteenth-century herbals, but an awful lot of unsellable books, and many in poor condition. I left with about 200 books. He wanted me to clear the lot, but I ran out of boxes, so I told him that I’ll collect the remainder (roughly another 500) the next time I’m passing. The leather trousers still seem remarkably incongruous.
Home at 5.30 to find that Katie, a former employee and now a medical student at Glasgow University, was waiting in the shop. I’d forgotten that she’d said she was coming round for tea at 4.30. Flo had locked her in.
Shortly after Katie had left, Maria and her
cohorts turned up to set up for the Galloway Supper Club. I lit the fire and gave the big room a blast from the industrial space heater before the guests started to arrive at 7.30. It was a very entertaining evening, and Maria’s food was – as always – exquisite. Crawled into bed at about 1 a.m., once we’d finished clearing up.
Till Total £115.49
8 Customers
SATURDAY, 21 MARCH
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Flo in, and it was a beautiful day, so I spent most of it gardening. The garden behind the shop is a long, fairly narrow maze of lawns, beds and trees. Since I bought the shop in 2001, I have replanted and redesigned most of it, and despite the long, gloomy winters, at this time of year it brings me enormous pleasure as it awakens into spring.
In the evening I checked the emails and found this one from Nicky:
Oh what a disappointment to make a return visit to IKEA after 18 years, the place was FULL of whinging, squalling toddlers & sold out of the stuff I was so excited about …. HOWEVER, who was at the next checkout …? None other than the mountaineer Jamie somebody who was stranded on the Eiger (or some other mountain) for days, & lost his climbing partner & his hands & feet. He was buying a plant.
Katie came around again after work, and we watched the final match of the Six Nations rugby tournament. After she left I spotted my copy of The New Confessions, which I’d only managed to get fifteen pages into before putting it down behind a pile of other books. Read it for an hour and discovered that – as with Any Human Heart – Boyd captures the oppressive nature of boarding-school like nobody else I’ve read. His description of the narrator running away from school – ‘It was a fresh cool evening with high, heavy cloud. There was a smell of honey in the air from the sycamores and a woodlark whispered high above us. A dull, bluey light lay over everything’ – took me straight back to the age of ten, and the smells and sounds of the summer night when a friend and I briefly escaped my boarding-school in the middle of the night. Unlike Todd, Boyd’s protagonist, we were – of course – discovered and returned to captivity.