A customer with a ponytail that stuck out near the crown of his head leaving a sort of mullet-style around his neck bought a bookshop bag. I thought twice about selling him one, as I suspect seeing him with it might put more people off than it attracts.
Till Total £287.47
25 Customers
THURSDAY, 2 APRIL
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 4
Four orders, all Amazon.
Beautiful sunny day.
Kate the postie delivered a letter from Anthony Parker of Dumfries asking if I can look at his books as he’s moving into a care home. I have another book deal in Dumfries tomorrow, so will try to tie it in with that.
At 11 a.m. an old woman brandishing a Scottish National Party badge haggled over an old hardback copy of Pinocchio in pristine condition. It was £4.50. ‘You can’t honestly expect me to pay that, not in these straitened times.’ It clearly hadn’t occurred to her that bookshops are more exposed than most to the strictures of ‘straitened times’.
Three people brought boxes of books in, nearly all rubbish. It’s that time of year when people start to clear out, move house and spring clean, so we’re invariably inundated with books in March and April.
I worked my way through the boxes of books that Nicky had bought in East Kilbride (she happened to be up there at exactly the time someone called to tell me they had books to sell, so she did the deal on my behalf). They were mostly in very grubby condition, but that could as likely be from spending two weeks in Nicky’s van as anything else. I still have twenty boxes in my van from the Hawick deals to unload, and the shop is piling up with boxes of books.
After I’d closed the shop, I replied to Emanuela, asking her when she thought she might be able to start.
Till Total £98.50
8 Customers
FRIDAY, 3 APRIL
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Good Friday, Bank Holiday. Thankfully Nicky is happy to work on Bank Holidays and came in to ‘help’. In fact, so oblivious is she to holidays of any kind – even religious ones – that I can call on her pretty much any time, and if she’s free, she’ll come in.
This morning I telephoned the man who’d brought in the wildfowling books and offered him £200 for them. He wasn’t happy, and had clearly been expecting a lot more. In fact, he said that someone had offered him £250 two years ago for just one of the books in the collection. I suspect this may have been a ploy to push me to increase my offer – I’d checked them all against online prices to reach our figure, and among them there was no book which was anywhere near £250. So either he was lying to try to get more from me, or – if he was genuinely offered £250 for the book two years ago – he was greedy and thought he could get more. Either way he’s lost out. He’s going to collect them on Tuesday.
Wildfowling is a reasonably popular sport around these parts; the creek-riven flats of the salt marsh at the bottom of the hill that Wigtown perches on are a huge habitat for geese in winter, and often – after squatting in the muddy trenches as dawn breaks – wildfowlers come into the shop dragging clods of clay on their boots. They always ask for wildfowling books but never buy any of our stock of them, claiming that they’re overpriced, yet when they wish to sell their own books, they expect me to pay considerably more than they’re worth. It’s rare that people selling their books don’t accept what I’m prepared to offer, except with wildfowlers, who seem to have a hugely inflated sense of their value.
After lunch I went to view the library of Anthony Parker, who had written to me to ask if I’d come and buy his books as he’s moving into a care home. As I drove up the rough farm track to his remote cottage I realised that I’d been there before several years previously and had bought books from him back then. His wife had been alive then, and he had been quite mobile. Today he was alone. His sight was deteriorating daily, and he could only shuffle about using a frame which he had clearly made himself out of an old wooden trolley with two walking sticks gaffer-taped to it. It was an impressively utilitarian contraption with shelves and wheels. He’s moving to Surrey to a care home nearer his children. He turns ninety tomorrow. I bought a box of books from him and about fifty Ordnance Survey maps.
I made it back home at about 5.30 p.m. and went to the pub with Callum and Tracy, who I hadn’t seen in quite a while. She’s been busily job-hunting, but there’s so little industry in the area that most people I know work for themselves.
Checked the emails when I returned from the pub later and found one from Emanuela asking if she can start on 2 July, to which I readily agreed. Now I have to deal with the problem of converting the Garden Room. There are probably two thousand books in there, and I have nowhere to store them. I’ll have to get the place ready before she arrives.
Cloda and Leo arrived from Ireland at 11 p.m. with their baby, Elsa. Bed at about 2 a.m. Cloda is an Irish friend who I met when I lived in Bristol. She’s a pharmacist and now lives in Dublin with Leo, her Argentine partner. We often share stories about customers, although hers tend to be of a slightly more criminal disposition than mine, frequently stealing narcotics or attempting armed robbery.
Till Total £228
22 Customers
SATURDAY, 4 APRIL
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Nicky was in again today, and the sun was shining. Cloda and Elsa were up and in the kitchen when I came down.
Today was the first Wigtown market of the year. There seemed to be better stalls than in previous years. The market runs from April to October, and is a motley affair with stalls selling everything from Country Music CDs and tartan travel rugs to locally grown vegetables.
Just after lunch there was a telephone call from someone in Castle Douglas with a northern English accent who wants to bring some banana boxes of books over on Tuesday. ‘I’ve only just moved here, how do I get to Wigtown?’ Getting to places in Galloway is pretty straightforward: it’s a thinly populated place with few roads, so I just told him to aim west.
Went to the Steam Packet in the Isle of Whithorn for lunch, with Cloda, Leo, Callum and his friend Murray, and Murray’s girlfriend Vivien. The Isle of Whithorn is a beautiful fishing village about 15 miles away, and the Steam Packet is an excellent pub on the harbourside. Visitors always ask why it’s called ‘the Isle’ when it isn’t, in fact, an island. Local lore has it that it was once an island, separated from the mainland by a shallow sandbank, and shallow-drafted smuggling boats being pursued by customs vessels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would – if the tide was right – head for the sound between the Isle and the mainland. They could cross it, but the deeper-drafted customs boats would run aground, so the authorities built a causeway connecting the Isle to the mainland to prevent such smuggling escapades. Much as I like the colourfulness of this explanation, I would question its veracity.
The shop was refreshingly busy all day. People start to emerge from hibernation at this time of year, and the movable feast of Easter always brings visitors to the town.
Till Total £672.93
52 Customers
MONDAY, 6 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
Easter Bank Holiday.
Cold, grey morning, with a thick sea mist over the town, but an abundance of customers – mainly families with young children and not spending any money. A very different day from Saturday.
I couldn’t find one of the orders: Two Sons of Galloway by McKerlie. I’ve had a few copies of this, but they must be scarce online as this one sold for £120. One of the other orders was for a two-volume set The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, which sold for £152, which slightly makes up for the lack of the McKerlie, and is a vast improvement on our usual average online sale of £7.
Two Sons of Galloway is a title that raises the issue of identity for me. Locals around here don’t describe themselves as ‘coming from’ a place; they say that they ‘belong to’ a place, as if it owns
them, rather than the other way around. Janetta (who keeps the shop and the house clean and tidy) has lived in Wigtown for most of her life, but she would say that she ‘belongs’ to Mochrum, a tiny village about 8 miles away. Growing up here with an Irish mother and an English father, I’ve always felt that – despite being born in Galloway – I could never really say that I ‘belong’ here. Not because I don’t feel that I do, more because there’s a sense among others that to be entitled to say that, you have to have several generations of Gallovidians behind you before you’re permitted to feel that sense of identification with the place.
Many years ago, when I was helping my father with the ‘clipping’ (sheep shearing), one of the clippers – a man called Lesley Drysdale – asked my father how long he’d lived in Galloway. He replied that he and my mother had been here for twenty years. The clipper told him that in another five years he’d have served enough time to be considered ‘settled’. It’s a strangely displacing sensation, the feeling that – in the place that feels more like home than anywhere else – others see you as not belonging there. The rolling drumlins, the meandering rivers and the rugged coastline of the Machars are so integral to my sense of self that I suspect that, if I was living anywhere else, I would feel that part of me was absent.
By two o’clock the mist had burned off, and the sun came through, at which point the customers deserted the shop for the hills and beaches. I didn’t see anyone after three o’clock.
I cycled to my parents’ house (six miles) after work, as my sister Vikki was down visiting them with her husband, Alex, and their three daughters. Made it back home at around 11 p.m.
Till Total £155.49
19 Customers
TUESDAY, 7 APRIL
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
No orders again today. This is extremely unusual under any circumstances, but twice in three days, and over the holiday period, leads me to suspect that Monsoon is having problems again.
Awoke with a rheumy and productive cold. I wonder which one of the ill-behaved snotty brats in the shop over the Easter period was kind enough to share that particular virus with me.
At 9.45 a.m. a short fat man appeared clutching a piece of paper. He came nervously to the counter and asked, ‘Have I got the right place?’ He turned out to be the banana box man who had telephoned on Saturday. He brought the boxes in, whispered conspiratorially, ‘Where’s the nearest public toilet?’, then scampered off to find it.
I spent twenty minutes going through the six boxes. All the books were in pristine condition and an extremely unusual mix of subjects: predominantly transport, pest control (twelve books) and the Pierrepoint family of executioners. We agreed a price of £120.
In the afternoon, after I’d priced up and shelved the banana box books, I started going through boxes I’d bought from the house in Hawick two weeks ago and came across a handsome 25-volume set of the Swanston edition of Stevenson, limited edition. Unfortunately there isn’t space for it in the shop, so I’ve listed it on eBay.
Email from someone wishing to dispose of her late father’s books:
I know some of the hunting books have a fair amount of resale value and I need to generate as much off the books as I can – just as you want to pay as little as possible! There will always be a compromise position.
I feel vaguely insulted that this complete stranger’s perception of me is of an almost criminal mendicant.
Vikki and Alex came to the shop with the girls, the youngest of whom, Lily, proceeded to chase Captain around the place, and insisted on climbing into the window display at the front of the shop. It wasn’t long before there was a squabble over a tube of Pringles, and the other two joined in and generally made themselves as irritating as they could possibly manage. I have no idea how Vikki puts up with it. She maintains that any combination of two of them is fine, but add a third in and the mix becomes volatile.
Two people asked to pay for £1.50 purchases with credit cards. Up until recently – and in line with many other businesses – we refused to accept credit cards for purchases under £10. This was in part because it is a bit of a pain, and also because we incur a small charge from the bank, but since Transport for London introduced contactless payment on the Tube in 2014 an increasing number of people seem to find it acceptable to pay for even the smallest of transactions this way. I suppose we will have to adapt to the inevitability of the cashless society.
By closing there was still no sign of the man who said he’d collect his wildfowling books today, so I went for a pint with Callum and Tracy, who has finally managed to get a job interview. She’s going to Turnberry to apply for a receptionist’s job. Despite his best efforts, most of the people of south-west Scotland refuse to refer to the hotel and golf course as the egomaniacally renamed ‘Trump Turnberry’. I suspect his proposed refit of the hotel will turn the place into a monument to diabolical taste. My old housemate Martin and I used to exchange Christmas presents when he lived here. One year – by total chance – we both gave one another a copy of a book by Peter York called Dictators’ Homes. I have no doubt that Donald Trump uses it for designing interiors like normal people would use Terence Conran’s House Book.
Till Total £162.89
17 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 8 APRIL
Online orders: 6
Orders found: 5
One of the orders was for three books, one of which was brought in by the banana box man yesterday – Outrage, by Ian Nairn, an unusual book. Nairn was an architectural critic who coined the word ‘subtopia’. One person ordering three books online means that the total number of books that went out today was eight: total value £99. Unusually high for our online sales, but it compensates for the two zero days we’ve had in the past week.
At 10 a.m. a young Italian woman came in to discuss life in a bookshop for an article she’s writing for a blog. While we were chatting about the hardships facing bookshops today, a customer was browsing and came to the counter with three books. The total was £23. He said ‘You’ll do them for £20, won’t you.’ The Italian woman’s jaw dropped in disbelief. Which reminds me, haven’t heard from Emanuela for a while. Perhaps she has changed her mind about coming to Scotland.
A young woman spent a long time in the erotica section, and bought five books from it. This is a refreshing change from the bearded men in polyester trousers who normally haunt this particular section.
Till Total £293.27
30 Customers
THURSDAY, 9 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
This morning I was pricing up and putting out recently acquired stock when I spotted the missing McKerlie Two Sons of Galloway. Fortunately I hadn’t cancelled the order from Monday as I suspected the book was around somewhere. A customer must have picked it up, read it, then returned it to a different shelf. Sadly, this is far from uncommon.
Email from Emanuela:
Shaun,
I don’t know how to thanks you for your help. Tomorrow
I’m going to book the flight (July 2)
I’m very happy.
Emanuela
Also in today’s inbox was this from someone who is after some Penguin books:
Hello,
I’m getting married next month and we’re having a bit of a Penguin book theme.
We’re going to have some Penguin books at the reception venue as decoration. We have managed to get hold of some orange books online, but need to get a few more, as well as some other colours – greens, blues, yellows, lilacs etc. We really want the iconic solid background with white/cream horizontal stripe across the middle.
Is this something you might be able to help with? We’re not in Scotland so would need to arrange delivery.
Ideally, we’d probably look at getting another 5 orange books, then 20–25 of other various colours.
The internal condition of the books is unimportant and if they’re a bit battered on the outside, providing the
y’re in one piece and not too faded, would be fine. We’re prepared to pay 20–25 pence per book.
It’s interesting to note that in this sort of situation, because they just see the books as place mats, or decoration, or whatever they’re going to use them for, people see the books as being relatively worthless. Why would I sell books that I can get £2.50 each for one-tenth of that?
Just after lunch a well spoken teenage girl rushed excitedly to the counter and said, ‘This bookshop is amazing, I’ve just bumped into my best friend’s cousin here. She lives in Dundee and we live in Newcastle.’ There really does seem to be a serendipity about bookshops, not just with finding books you never knew existed, or that you’ve been searching for for years, but with people too. Often customers – not locals – will bump into people they know from a totally different walk of life in the shop. I’ve overheard dozens of conversations along these lines.
At 4.45 p.m. a thin man with a wispy beard appeared and wandered about the shop, making the occasional grunting noise and seemed to be engaged in a wrestling contest with his cardigan. It wasn’t clear whether he was trying to put it on or remove it. He left twenty minutes later, empty-handed, with one arm in a sleeve and the other not.
By closing there was still no sign of the man who’d brought in the wildfowling books, so I telephoned him to remind him that they’re cluttering up the shop. He’s going to pick them up on Saturday now. The shop is groaning under the weight of boxes of books that have come in recently, and his books are not only in the way but in danger of being priced up and shelved, or thrown out.
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 9