Confessions of a Bookseller
Page 8
Till Total £106.30
15 Customers
MONDAY, 23 MARCH
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
Order for a book called Save Your Own Seed.
Telephone call at 9.30 a.m.;
Good morning to you, sir. I’ve got some books I’m interested in selling. I’ll read you all the titles and you can tell me what you’re going to offer me for them. Harmsworth’s Universal Encyclopedia, volume I, Harmsworth’s Universal Encyclopedia, volume II, Harmsworth’s Universal Encyclopedia, volume III, Harmsworth’s Universal Encyclopedia, volume IV…
Every time I attempted to interrupt him to tell him that none of them was worth anything, he’d just get louder and carry on reeling out his list of worthless books.
Two elderly customers came in at 11 a.m. and left after five minutes, saying ‘Eeeh, you could spend all day in here, couldn’t you.’ Well, apparently not.
Spent the afternoon listing books on the database to sell online.
At four o’clock a customer appeared at the counter with two books, one priced at £20 and the other at £8.50 and asked ‘Will £20 buy the two?’
Till Total £189
13 Customers
TUESDAY, 24 MARCH
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
One of the orders was for a book I’d listed yesterday. It’s surprising how often this happens.
Till Total £153.39
16 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 25 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
This morning a customer found a scarce book called Cairo to Persia and Back, dated 1933, with beautiful illustrations. We had it priced at £30. He brought it to the counter, slapped it down and said ‘If you’re interested, I’ll give you a tenner for this book, which I think is vastly overpriced.’
I was far from interested.
Shortly after he’d left, an old man in Lycra cycling trousers, puffer jacket and wide brimmed leather hat came into the shop and headed straight for the antiquarian section, where he spent a lot of time taking books off the shelves, opening them, tutting, then putting them straight back.
By lunch the takings were £2.50.
Telephone call from a woman inquiring about a book called La vida breve. She’d seen that we have two copies listed online and asked if I could put them aside. She’ll be in on Saturday to ‘have a look at them’. I hadn’t really looked at our copies when I bought them, but it’s a very attractive, cloth-bound privately printed book of poems, all set in this area, with well-executed woodcuts, and printed on handmade paper. Our copies are priced at £100 each.
At closing time I checked the RAF observer’s book on eBay – it has four bids, 218 views, thirty watchers and is at £26. One day to go.
Loaded the van with forty boxes of dead/rotated stock to take to the recycling plant in Glasgow tomorrow on the way to a book deal in Hawick.
Till Total £40.50
5 Customers
THURSDAY, 26 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Nicky arrived on time, unusually, and immediately told me that I looked like a tramp. As I was reaching up to draw the curtains in the shop, my T-shirt must have exposed a bit of flesh. She told me that she’d ‘never seen anything so disgusting’ in her life.
In the afternoon, I set off for Hawick for the night so that I can look at two collections of books in private libraries tomorrow morning.
Checked Facebook in the hotel to discover that Nicky had hijacked the shop account again and written the following:
Dear friends, having been away for 2 weeks, I was happily talking away to the BGC while he ignored me & smoothed down the puffy door-drapes; I was so happy that it took me a minute to realise that the putty/stilton/foxed endpaper effect which was confusing me was his MIDRIFF – in a CROPTOP! YUCK! How distressing is that?
Supper in Hawick, where I attempted to read The Bankrupt Bookseller Speaks Again as I worked my way through an enormous bowl of mussels. I say ‘attempted to read’ because I was competing with the background sound of a very loud Canadian woman regaling a group of people who looked stunned, bored and vaguely afraid in equal measure as she dominated every conversation on their table.
Till Total £199.40
19 Customers
FRIDAY, 27 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
In the morning I left the hotel at 9.30 a.m. and headed to the first house – a beautiful big country house whose owner was a very well-spoken man called Christopher Ward, a retired journalist and one-time editor of the Daily Express. He’d been to Wigtown in his capacity as an author during the festival a couple of years ago. He wrote a biography of his grandfather, who had been a violinist in the band that played on as the Titanic sank. The book’s called And the Band Played On. There were a considerable number of books, mainly modern and in good condition. I advised him to remove everything he wants to keep, then call me in a few months, I’ll come and assess what’s left. Over a cup of tea we discussed (at length) the state of the publishing industry and the problems facing writers, whose average income is now £11,000, below the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s ‘minimum standard of living’. This is something that I hear repeatedly from writers during the book festival, several of whom – twenty years after they embarked on careers in writing – are earning the same as they were back then, and not just in ‘real terms’, but in terms of their actual income.
I left Christopher’s at 12.30 p.m. and arrived at the next house on my list (an hour early) at 1 p.m. The house belongs to a friend’s aunt who was widowed last year. Again, a gorgeous house – this time an old manse – and in beautiful grounds. I took away a few boxes and parted with £300. Nice set of The Gentleman’s Magazine from the early nineteenth century.
Left Hawick at 2.30 p.m. and got back to the shop at 5.30 to discover Nicky still pottering away. When she (eventually) unlocked the door and let me in, it transpired that she had made the unholiest of messes – even by her appalling standards – and was busily trying to tidy up before I got back. There were books everywhere, pens all over the place, rags on the floor (‘I use them for cleaning up the dirty books’) and boxes strategically distributed so as to cause as much of a nuisance as possible.
Once Nicky had finished tidying up, I checked the emails and found one from a customer regarding a book, A Haunted Inheritance: A Story of Modern Mysticism, which we have priced on Abe at £75: ‘Hello, would you consider selling this book at 45 GBP plus shipping, etc? Please let me know your thoughts on this. Thank you in advance.’ I replied and told him no, I would not consider selling at that price. That would be a 40 per cent discount, meaning that we’d lose money.
Went to the pub for a pint with Callum after Nicky had gone home and reminisced about the time we canoed down the River Bladnoch, the river that cuts through the land at the base of the hill on which Wigtown sits. It’s a gorgeous river, lined with native broadleaf trees, and the higher reaches of it contain some fast-flowing rapids before spilling into the wide flatness of the salt marsh. Callum is always the instigator of these adventures, and he’d managed to borrow a canoe for me from a friend. On a warm summer’s day we navigated our way down without incident until we got to a particularly fast section and I managed to put a hole in my canoe. Or, more accurately, Callum’s friend’s canoe. From then on it was a question of seeing how far I could get before I sank and had to upturn the canoe and empty it. Fortunately the distillery and the pub were less than a mile away, so it wasn’t too tortuous a final leg.
Till Total £127.78
18 Customers
SATURDAY, 28 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Typically, of the two orders, the one I couldn’t find was the more expensive, a £50 book about Mohammed.
In one corner of the shop we have a few shelves of small antiques: jewellery, decanters, o
rnaments, that sort of thing. There’s a little sign that says ‘Antiques’ above it. A man came to the counter with two unpriced penknives from there and asked, ‘How much for them two? I got them from your junk shelves over there.’ Oh, customer-beating-stick, where art thou?
Checked eBay to see what the RAF log-book made. To my surprise it was £156.09.
The customer who had asked me to put aside our two copies of La vida breve came in with her husband. I gave her both copies to look at. They spent an hour poring over them then left, saying ‘We’ll have a think about it’, which, as every bookseller knows, is code for ‘they’re too expensive’.
This afternoon I discovered that Nicky has reinstated her ‘Homefront’ shelf, despite clear instructions not to do so. A year ago she discovered a box of romantic fiction set during the First World War and decided to invent a genre of her own – ‘Homefront novels’ – none of which sold, so I told her that I didn’t want to see them again. They kept reappearing over the year, and I kept removing them. I’ve replaced it with a shelf of green Penguins. Penguin has always been an innovative publisher, and the simple, elegant covers – a single colour with a white band through the middle – as well as their reputation for publishing good books make them still sought after. Each colour on the distinctive covers denotes a different subject, so orange is (usually) fiction, green is crime (the best-selling of the Penguins in my shop), purple is biography, black is classics, pink is travel, and so on.
After lunch I received an email from an Italian woman:
Dear Sirs,
I would write this mail hoping to not disturb. My name is Emanuela Maranci and I am an Italian student at the University of Turin. I studied cinema and arts and I am looking for a job (even occasional, at the moment). In these years of study and sacrifice I had the privilege to observe closely books world, experience that allowed me to understand the true value of every page and every word written. Especially the job in Film and Resistance National Archive required more skills: having to make a Catalog dedicated to Italian Cinema of 1964, I was involved in the research and selection of articles (also digital), research material in magazines, organization of layout with use of Photoshop (also useful to improve the quality of some articles damages by the passage of time). I am twenty-five years old, and I feel I must do something in my life, because, unfortunately, study is not enough. Expand my knowledge, work in contact with books, in a country like Britain, would be a real dream. You need a help?
Thank you for your time and consideration. CV attached.
Respectfully yours,
Emanuela Maranci
I’ll reply tomorrow and see if she’s prepared to work in the shop in exchange for bed and board.
An enormous man with a tiny dog (smaller than Captain) spent half an hour in the erotica section before relocating to the theology section.
Till Total £268.94
18 Customers
MONDAY, 30 MARCH
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
The clocks went forward last night, but I forgot to change the time on the alarm clock so I was half an hour late opening.
The shop was busy all morning, so it must be school holidays.
Among the usual mountain of Monday morning emails was one from the man who wanted the £75 book for £45 asking me to counter-offer. I told him that £60 was the least I could let the book go for and still make a profit.
Before lunch I spotted that Nicky had taped a bit of paper over the ‘Follow us on Twitter’ sticker which is on one of the glass panels in the door. Further investigation revealed that she’d tried to pick it off and made a complete mess of it, so had stuck something over it in the hope that I wouldn’t notice.
I replied to Emanuela, the Italian woman who had emailed looking for work, and told her that I have already agreed to take someone on for the summer, but she’s welcome to come and work if she doesn’t mind not being paid. I’ve never done this before and feel deeply uncomfortable about it, but I can’t afford two sets of wages.
Till Total £114.98
15 Customers
TUESDAY, 31 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Wild, windy day, showers and glorious sunshine in equal balance. I was reminded of Anna’s favourite comment on the weather at this time of year: ‘April showers bring Mayflowers, and what do Mayflowers bring? Pilgrims.’ I suppose it must be a New England thing, and similar to our ‘March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb’.
Both orders today were from Amazon.
The customer who wanted the £75 book for £40 replied agreeing to pay the £60 as long as it included shipping to America. I replied that he could not have the shipping for free as I’d already explained about my margin, and that if he looked online he’d find that the only other copy available was £250.
A customer came in at 9.15 and hovered about the place, looking as though she was about to ask a question, and making it impossible for me to go and make the cup of tea that I was desperately in need of.
The place was full of more screaming children rampaging through the shop throughout the day.
Just before closing, a customer brought in four bags of wild-fowling books. He left his number and I said I’d work out a price and get back to him.
Till Total £138.54
23 Customers
APRIL
When she described the second-hand bookshop where he had worked for the best years of his life I was able to tell her that I knew her husband quite well, for I had been in the habit at one time of browsing among the bookshops in that maze of narrow streets near the Old University buildings in Edinburgh. At one time there were a considerable number of these shops: a number which has now, alas, been much reduced.
Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller
If Augustus Muir, who wrote these words in his spoof diary of Baxter in 1942, could have foreseen quite how much more significantly the number of bookshops would be reduced in the decade following 2005, he would doubtless have been horrified; their number has almost halved in the UK since that date, and this is the tenth year in a row that has seen a decline.
Those who have weathered the storm of the advance of online technology have largely done so because they’ve adapted, or diversified, or because their original business model is impervious to the vagaries of changes in shopping habits, like the established top-end antiquarian bookshops – Maggs, Harrington, Jonkers and their like – whose customers tend to not feel the ravages of economic cycles in quite the same way as those of us considerably lower down the economic food chain. And, by way of green shoots, there are still independent bookshops opening up: perhaps the best-known of these in the past few years has been Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, which opened in Bath in 2006, and whose owner, Nic Bottomley, is happy to concede that the considerable tourist footfall of the city lends itself to the continuing success of the business. That, though, is not to detract from the innovative ideas that have sprung from his opening the shop, such as customised reading lists and a ‘reading spa’. These are the threads which it seems most surviving bookshops have woven in common – making the bookshop an ‘experience’ and offering something fresh and different, which online shopping can never provide, whether it’s a café or a model railway running through the shop (Barter Books), or Sarah Henshaw’s amazing Book Barge, or having regular live events, such as stand-up comedy, poetry or music. Customers expect more, and unless bookshops continue to offer more, our numbers will continue to dwindle. My own business has survived in part because of the Random Book Club, whose members receive a book a month from my stock but have no control over what they will receive, and while this generates a good deal of extra work for me, it saved the business a few years ago.
WEDNESDAY, 1 APRIL
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Both of today’s orders are Abe. None from Amazon.
Kate the postie
delivered the mail at 10 a.m. It included a letter from Dumfries Infirmary confirming the appointment for an MRI scan on my back at 12.45 p.m. on 14 April.
Emanuela, the Italian woman who emailed me about working in the shop, replied to say that she’d be delighted to work for free in exchange for bed and board. I spent the day thinking about it. I have grown quite accustomed to my privacy and space, so I spoke to Callum about the possibility of converting the back of the Garden Room (a remote part of the shop which generates very few sales) into a self-contained bothy.* We worked out that the cost of doing it would be recouped in saved wages within two months. It would originally have been living-quarters for a member of staff when the house was home to George McHaffie and his family, who built it in about 1830.
Sandy McCreath, a local farmer, dropped in to discuss an idea he’s had for getting four farmers to keep a video diary for a year and make a series about the reality of farming, rather than the sanitised version as portrayed on Countryfile.
The first customers of the day, a family of four, arrived at 11.30 and stayed for about ten minutes before leaving empty-handed.
I went through the wildfowling books that came in yesterday, which I’d neglected to value. Their condition wasn’t great, but there were some reasonable books among them. Ten years ago I’d have bitten his hand off for this lot, but now prices for shooting books seem to be in free fall, as is demand. I think a price of £200 is fair in today’s market. It would have been double that a decade ago.