Till Total £432.20
16 Customers
FRIDAY, 10 APRIL
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 4
Nicky appeared at 9.10 a.m. She immediately started raking through the boxes of stock I’ve earmarked for recycling, and taking books out and putting them back on the shelves. Then, when I was upstairs making her a cup of tea, she spent £60 of my money on three ex-library books that a customer brought in to sell.
In the inbox today was this email from an Amazon customer:
Im looking for a book but I can’t remember the title.
Its around about 1951.
Part of the story line is about a cart of apples being upset, that’s all I know, its for a friend who I want to surprise.
Can you help please?
Kind regards
As I was pricing up books, I came across Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a book that several people have recommended. Flicking through it, I came across this passage and was reminded of Joyce’s assertion that The Bookshop is haunted:
There is a manor in Scotland, infested with poltergeists, where as many as seventeen spontaneous fires have broken out in one day: poltergeists like to turn people out of bed violently by tipping the bed end over end, and I remember the case of a minister who was forced to leave his home because he was tormented, day after day, by a poltergeist who hurled at his head hymn books stolen from a rival church.
Closed the shop ten minutes early and went to the pub with Callum and a few others.
Till Total £177.99
17 Customers
SATURDAY, 11 APRIL
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
No Nicky today. I forget what her reason was, but it was predictably bizarre. I think it may have involved either her pet rabbit or her cat. Or possibly both. The missing order today was for a £40 book about the clearance of Raasay which Nicky listed recently. I searched the surrounding shelves but could find no sign of it.
At 10.30 Callum turned up for a cup of tea. He was in town to pick up his car, which he had driven to the pub last night. After a few pints he decided that it was prudent to cycle home.
Shortly after Callum had arrived, Fenella and her children turned up for a chat, shortly followed by Tris. Fenella and Tris are friends I’ve known since childhood. Although I knew them both from an early age, they didn’t know each other particularly well, which is unusual in a place so thinly populated. We decamped to the kitchen as the shop was filling up with customers, so I left Callum in charge of tea duties and returned to the shop as they all chatted and caught up with one another in the kitchen.
The man who’d brought the wildfowling books in came to collect them just after noon. I helped him load them into his car. He reappeared five minutes later angrily claiming that Snowden Slights, the most valuable of the books, wasn’t there. I asked him if he’d mind looking again while I looked through the shop’s stock in case it had been accidentally priced up and shelved. Five minutes later he reappeared clutching the book apologetically.
A customer brought in a leather bag full of books and asked if he could have credit in the shop in exchange for them, so I fished out a few and offered him £20 credit for them. The rest were Alexander McCall Smith – stock that is increasingly appearing in almost every box or bag that customers bring in and which is selling poorly – like most best-sellers – in the second-hand book business.
At 4 p.m. a man arrived with a carload of books. They were mainly unsellable, but I found two interesting titles among them: Marijuana Potency and Marijuana Botany. I already know which of my customers is going to buy them.
Till Total £316.87
36 Customers
MONDAY, 13 APRIL
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 4
Today’s best order was for a Frank Brangwyn illustrated Rubaiyat, at £75.
By 11.20 a.m. there hadn’t been a single person through the door – not even Kate, the postie.
I read the letter from Dumfries Infirmary about the MRI scan again. There’s a questionnaire about general health which included a question about piercings. At the bottom there was an instruction that read, ‘If you answered “yes” to any of these questions please telephone the MRI unit before your appointment’, so I called them and explained that I have a piercing. The specialist advised me to find a magnet and see whether or not it responds to a magnetic force. If it does, then it will be ripped from my body when the MRI passes over it. Slight cause for concern, so I searched the house but couldn’t find a magnet.
An old man approached me as I was pricing up stock and asked, ‘I wonder if you can help me, I’m looking for self-help books.’ I’m almost certain that he failed to see the irony, so I asked him what sort of self-help books he was looking for, to which he replied ‘I don’t know’.
At four o’clock the telephone rang. It was a woman who’d tried to buy a book that we have listed on Amazon, but her computer had crashed during the process, so she thought she’d do it over the phone instead. I took down her name, address, credit card details and telephone number. After the call, as I was manually inputting her card information to the machine, I couldn’t understand why it consistently failed to complete the transaction until I finally realised that I’d typed her telephone number in instead of her card number.
Just before closing, an elderly couple brought in an old family Bible. These are rarely worth anything, even in good condition. Almost every household had one in the Victorian age, and there is no demand for them whatsoever, as far as I can see. The only Bible I’ve had that has proved to have some value, and been relatively easy to sell, has been the ‘Breeches Bible’, an edition of the Geneva Bible published in 1579 (preceding the King James Bible), and so known because Genesis Chapter III Verse 7 reads: ‘Then the eies of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed figge tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches.’
Till Total £130.29
15 Customers
TUESDAY, 14 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Flo was working in the shop today, as I needed cover for the MRI scan on my back. I left Wigtown at 10 a.m. and drove to Dumfries. After much searching I managed to find a magnet in Homebase. Uncertain whether or not the piercing would prove to be magnetic, I bought a pair of pliers too, just in case I needed to remove it, then drove to the Infirmary and found the MRI unit. There was nobody there, so I went into the loo with the pliers and magnet. The piercing appeared to be unresponsive to the magnet, so I left it in, then waited a very nervous half-hour before I was summoned, given a hospital robe and asked all the questions on the questionnaire another two times, each by a different person. Eventually I went into the room where the scanner was and was slid slowly into the coffin-like machine, unable to move for the next twenty minutes while the thing made hideous noises, like some sort of machine from Doctor Who, all the while terrified that my piercing might prove to be magnetic after all.
I left Dumfries at about 2 p.m. and was back in the shop by 3 p.m. to find Flo sitting reading a book, surrounded by boxes of books that customers had brought in to sell. One day I must take the time to teach her about the business, so that it doesn’t all fall to me and Nicky.
Flo: The takings always go up when I’m working in the shop.
Me: It’s not because you’re here, it’s because I’m NOT here.
Till Total £297.08
22 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 15 APRIL
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Telephone call at 8.20 a.m. from Radio Scotland. They wanted to do a piece about people using bookshops as a browsing facility, then buying books online. They called again at 10 a.m. and I contributed to a live chat with Sara Sheridan, a writer who by coincidence was my landlady when I was at university in Dublin. I was shaking nervously throughout the whole thing – I have a paralysing fear of pu
blic speaking and I hate doing live radio. No doubt I came over as a complete moron – certainly from the tone of the texts and emails that the show was receiving live and reading out there were plenty of people who felt that browsing in shops then buying online was a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
A family of four came into the shop after lunch. The mother looked at me and said, ‘So you’ve finished being on the radio for the day, have you? We were listening to it in the car on the way over here.’ They browsed and bought a few books. As she was paying for them, she told me that we’d met when I was a child. We’d been on a family holiday to visit some friends in Jersey when I was ten, and she’d been their au pair. I refrained from reminding her that our host had a rule that women had to be topless in the swimming pool, and hers had been the first breasts that I’d ever seen.
I had totally forgotten that I’d listed the Swanston set of Stevenson on eBay. I hadn’t bothered putting a reserve on it. It sold for £20, a dismal figure for a complete set of this limited-edition Stevenson. I’ve unquestionably lost money on it, but I suppose if that’s what the market is prepared to pay for it, then that’s all it’s worth, and it was taking up a lot of space in the shop.
In the afternoon I noticed a young girl staring up at the skeleton that is suspended from the ceiling in the gallery in the shop. Her mother told me that she refused to walk underneath it. The girl asked me if it had a name, something that nobody has asked before and which I’d never considered, so I asked her what she thought its name should be. She instantly replied ‘Skelly’, which, coincidentally is how Stuart Kelly (literary critic, writer and Wigtown Book Festival institution) is referred to by his cohorts.
A very tall American couple came in late, just as I was contemplating closing early. She bought a book. As they left (at 4.55), she asked, ‘Is there anywhere around here we can grab a late lunch?’ It’s hard enough to get lunch at lunchtime in Wigtown, let alone at nearly five o’clock.
Callum called to say that he’s going climbing in the Highlands tomorrow, so I emailed Nicky to see if she can cover so that I can get away for a couple of days.
Closed up and went for a pint with Tracy, who had a job interview at Turnberry today.
Till Total £146
15 Customers
THURSDAY, 16 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
Nicky came in to cover so that I could get away for a couple of days. Callum arrived at 9 a.m., so I packed my climbing gear and we headed off, arriving at Lochinver at 5 p.m., at the same time as Murray and Vivien, two of Callum’s friends, who are joining us. Callum and I usually share a room on these trips.
Till Total £200.99
18 Customers
FRIDAY, 17 APRIL
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 3
The four of us set off from our B&B at 8.30 and headed for Suilven. On the walk we discussed the possibility of Callum doing the work to convert the Garden Room into a bothy in which Emanuela can stay during the summer. He seemed quite keen on the idea. We will have to start a.s.a.p. if it’s going to be ready in time.
Till Total £205
16 Customers
SATURDAY, 18 APRIL 2015
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Spent an exhilarating but exhausting day walking in the mountains of Assynt, in glorious sunshine in shorts and T-shirts.
Till Total £337.92
29 Customers
MONDAY, 20 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 1
Callum and I drove back down from Lochinver yesterday. Arrived back home at 6 p.m.
Today was another beautiful, sunny spring day.
Monsoon appears to have stopped working again, the antivirus software keeps mistaking it for some sort of infection and removing essential parts of it so that it won’t open.
Nicky left a note of her activities during my absence:
Bought some books
Turned some away
Swept outside
Emptied shelves in Railway Room
Brought Heraldry in from Garden Room
Entertained Captain
Attended to lovely customers suffering from diarrhoea
Smiled at everyone
Processed boxes
So, did very little as always
Dealt with many numpties
Took down ALL the Biggles books for a lovely old man
Listened to Mr Needy again
Lots & lots of swooning customers absolutely ADORING the shop.
There were a few other comments, but litigation would be hot on my heels if I included them.
Monsoon eventually replied to my emails with a Log Me In pin and took over my computer and fixed the problem.
An older man in trousers that were clearly designed to be worn by someone considerably younger than he was spent a while staring at the antiquarian section saying, ‘If only these books could talk, and tell us of the things they’ve seen.’
Till Total £74.50
9 Customers
TUESDAY, 21 APRIL
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
No orders, but yet another glorious sunny day. Jeff called in at 10 a.m. He was on his way to the funeral of one of his parishioners, but as a friend rather than in his capacity as a cleric. ‘Aye, she was one of the better ones’, he remarked sombrely as he left. He normally drops in when he’s waiting to pick up a prescription from the chemist, and is usually in a light-hearted mood, but today was different.
At eleven o’clock a customer came to the counter, demanded my attention and said, ‘There’s a bigger bookshop than this one in Alnwick’, then walked out. Customers often mention Barter Books in Alnwick in comparison to my shop. I’ve never been, but really ought to visit. As well as its superb reputation as a bookshop, it deserves recognition (or eternity in the fires of Hades) for the discovery of the now ubiquitous ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ Second World War poster, which the owner found in a box of books he’d bought at auction.
Sandy the tattooed pagan came in with seven new sticks, so I notched up £42 credit in his ledger. While I was chatting to him, a customer came to the counter with three books and told me that he’d always ‘had a relationship’ with books, and asked me what my relationship with books was. I was unable to answer – I couldn’t really think what to say, or what it was, other than as the objects that I buy and sell. There’s much more to it than that though.
Mr Deacon called in to order a book about Henry IV. It’s been some time since I’ve seen him, and he seemed his usual self, despite the recent, uncharacteristically candid revelation that he has Alzheimer’s. After we’d discussed the details of the book he wished to order, another regular customer, known to the staff here as ‘Mole-Man’, came in and spent his customary £35 on a diverse range of books. I attempted to engage him in conversation, but he wasn’t having any of it. Mole-Man is like Mr Deacon’s shorter, impecunious, myopic cousin: patchily shaven, and dressed in polyester rather than the silk of a QC, but no less rapacious in his thirst for knowledge than Mr Deacon – in fact, if anything, more so. He burrows and ferrets his way silently through the shop, almost invisibly, before popping up at the counter, dishevelled and blinking through milk-bottle glasses. The pile of books he brings to the counter is always eclectic in subject matter, and rarely consists of fewer than ten books. But, unlike Mr Deacon, he never speaks or makes eye contact. He hasn’t uttered a single word in our transactions in the five years or so that he has been a customer, and he always pays with cash, which he wrestles eagerly from his battered, tatty leather wallet. He is, unlike Mr Deacon, small in height, and – apart from occasional moments during his tunnelling exercises through the shop – I’ve only ever been able to see the top half of his face when he comes to the counter to pay. I don’t know his name, and I doubt very much whether he knows – or cares – to know mine. He is, I imagine, an inveterate reader who has indulged
his passion for reading at the expense of learning rudimentary social skills. I like him enormously. I have no idea why he comes to Wigtown; perhaps he has family here. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.
There was a new review of the shop on Facebook this morning from a customer called Jenna Fergus. I don’t even remember her.
I am totally disgusted at how rude and arrogant the owner is. He refused to help me access books that were out of reach due to his lazyness and complete disregard for customer satisfaction.
Till Total £128.50
9 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 22 APRIL
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Nicky was in today. The first thing she said when she arrived was ‘I brought you a present last week, but you were away. Organic pork sausages.’ I asked her what she did with them, given that she’s vegetarian. ‘I ate them. They were lovely.’
No orders again today, so I’ve emailed Monsoon to see what the problem is.
A man pulled up in front of the shop in an ancient, noisy Land Rover, then brought in a box of books about clocks. Nicky went through them and checked values online. She told me to offer him £70, which I did on his return to the shop following a walk. All he said was ‘I don’t think so’, as he picked them up and left without another word.
It was a lovely sunny day, so I called Tracy to see if she wanted to go for a walk. We got back to the shop by lunchtime to find Nicky and Petra standing outside the shop with their mouths open in gormless wonderment, staring at the sky. They appeared to be looking at what they clearly thought was a rare bird. Petra pointed at it and asked Tracy (RSPB member) what it was. She told them it was a seagull.
While we were out walking, Nicky had the following exchange with two customers:
Husband: Do you own this shop?
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 10