Nicky: No
Wife: Do you own this shop?
Nicky: No.
Husband: bla bla bla bla biggest store bla bla can I take your photo? [sticks camera phone in my face]
Nicky: No. Are you buying a book? [spoken from behind hand]
Wife: Oh, you’d let me take a photo if I bought a book.
Both walked out, bookless.
In the afternoon I had a short meeting with Davy Brown, local artist, about the Spring Fling event he wants to hold here in the shop. Spring Fling is an annual event in which artists and makers open their studios to the public. It has grown in numbers every year, and (like Wigtown Book Festival) is one of the cultural highlights of the Galloway calendar. Thousands of people descend on the area in the hope of snapping up a bargain from one of the participating artists (without gallery fees they can afford to drop prices), and out of curiosity to see the space in which the artists create their work. There are several suggested routes, and one of them passes through Wigtown. It usually brings good trade to all the businesses in the town, particularly the restaurants and cafés.
I left the shop at 2.30 p.m. to go to the paper recycling plant in Glasgow. Unfortunately I arrived at 4.40, to find that its closing time was 4.30, so I stayed with a friend in Glasgow.
Till Total £66
6 Customers
THURSDAY, 23 APRIL
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Dropped off the boxes of books at the recycling and headed home. Back in shop by noon. A spectacularly quiet day, but almost every customer bought a book.
Till Total £64
12 Customers
FRIDAY, 24 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 1
The only order I could find today was for a copy of a book called The Camper’s Hand Book, dated 1908, which contained a superb advert for Burberry, featuring a man wearing clothes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Boer War.
The other two orders were for books we had sold years ago on Amazon, but which Monsoon has somehow magically decided we still have. This causes massive headaches – we will now have to cancel the orders and risk negative feedback on Amazon (which we will almost certainly receive) because of a technical glitch with third-party software.
Callum came in to ask if I wanted to go to a talk about St Kilda in the County Buildings in Wigtown, but as Nicky has already worked her two days this week I was stuck in the shop. When I moved back to Wigtown in 2001, the place had a very different appearance from today. The Georgian gardens in the middle of the square had been hideously defiled by 1970s municipal planning, with raised beds built from reconstituted granite blocks, full of alpines and roses, and the County Buildings – arguably the architectural jewel in the town’s crown – were closed and fenced off. Now, though, the gardens have been restored to their former grandeur, and are far more used by visitors and locals alike than the granite monstrosity that they replaced; and the County Buildings, the former municipal seat of power – the grand Hôtel de Ville – has been renovated beautifully, and is in constant use by all sorts of community enterprises. At 10 a.m. a customer brought three books to the counter:
Me: That comes to £24.00 please.
Customer: £24.00? What? Those two are £2 each.
Me: Yes, but that one is £20.
Customer: But it looks just like the other two.
Tracy called to say that she’s been offered the job at Turnberry. She starts on Wednesday and tells me there are rumours that Donald Trump plans to visit some time soon. Hopefully there’s more truth in those than the rumours that he’s going to run for the US presidency.
In the afternoon, a man brought in three books on Lee Harvey Oswald and asked, ‘Are you buying at the moment?’ I gave him £5 for them, to which he rather depressingly told me, ‘I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m not going to re-read my books.’
Till Total £48
7 Customers
SATURDAY, 25 APRIL
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
For most of the morning a customer who clearly had no intention of buying a £400 antiquarian book about Scottish heraldry sat by the fire reading it, then left it on the table.
A customer brought a pile of books to the counter, then removed one and said, ‘I’ll put that one back, I’ve just remembered that I already downloaded it onto my Kindle.’ This has inspired me to produce some mugs with ‘Death to the Kindle’ printed on them, so I emailed Luise (occasional customer and excellent designer in Edinburgh) to see if she’d mind coming up with a design.
I have devised a new strategy for dealing with hagglers. When they ask for a discount, I’m going to ask them what they do for a living. Based on some spurious guesswork, I’ll judge whether they earn more than I do, or less. In the extremely unlikely event that they earn less, they can have a 10 per cent discount. In the almost inevitable event that they earn more, they can pay me 10 per cent extra. That’s progressive economics.
After the shop shut, Katarina (a young photographer who has moved to Wigtown from Bristol) appeared and asked if she could use the shop for a photo shoot, so I gave her the key and let her get on with it. She left at 7 p.m.
Till Total £334.89
23 Customers
SUNDAY, 26 APRIL
Shop closed. This morning I began boxing the contents of the Garden Room so that Callum can make a start on converting it back to a bothy, hopefully some time in the next few days.
Luise sent two designs for ‘Death to the Kindle’ mugs, so I’ve emailed them to Bev, who has the mug printing machine, and asked if she can produce twenty for me.
MONDAY, 27 APRIL
Online orders: 7
Orders found: 3
In the orders this morning was one for Lucy Inglis’s Georgian London, published in 2013, original price £20. Our copy sold for £11. It’s highly unusual for something so relatively recent not to have dropped to a penny on Amazon.
Typically, one of the unlocated books was the most expensive order of the day.
Mr Deacon came in at 3 p.m. looking for his book about Henry IV, which has yet to arrive.
Lisa, the local doctor’s wife, dropped in a box of books, so I gave her £10 for them. As we were chatting, a customer asked ‘What was the Shakespeare play with the Moor in it?’ Before I could admit that I couldn’t remember, Lisa had answered ‘Othello’, sparing me considerable embarrassment.
This afternoon there was a very satisfying encounter involving a customer who began requesting a discount on a pile of books about the Rolls-Royce company. His friend prodded him in the back and said, ‘You’ve got some nerve, asking for a discount from this poor bloke while you drive about in your fancy Rolls-Royces.’ He didn’t get a discount.
Went for a pint after work to send Tracy off – she starts her new job at Turnberry on Wednesday. She is now an employee of Donald Trump.
Till Total £214
18 Customers
TUESDAY, 28 APRIL
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Callum arrived at 9 a.m. to begin the conversion work on the Garden Room.
Two elderly customers came into the shop at 9.30 a.m. and wandered about for a while then – as they were heading towards the door – started saying ‘No, no, no’ to one another. I can only assume that they were unimpressed with the shop. Or me.
Mr Deacon’s book arrived in today’s post, so I left a message on his answering machine.
Bev dropped off twenty ‘Death to the Kindle’ mugs. They look fantastic. Luise did an excellent job with the design. Now I just need to sell the damned things. I’ve realised that the only way to circumvent the ferocious competition on Amazon, which squeezes your margins to the limit, is to control the supply of the product you’re selling, which means creating the product yourself; the mugs are perfect for this.
At noon a customer telephoned looking for an Edinburgh Telephone Directory
from 1966. We don’t have one for that year, but strangely, old directories – particularly trade directories – sell quite well online. I have one for 1974–75, but not 1966. Just after I’d put the telephone down from the directory caller, a man came to the counter with the £400 Scottish heraldry book and bought it – no haggling. Perhaps I had been slightly uncharitable about the customer who had spent the morning reading it by the fire last week. Perhaps he’d told this person – the man who bought it – about it.
There was a monstrous camper van parked in front of the shop all day, not only blocking the view but also hiding the shop from potential customers. The owner of it came into the shop and said, ‘You’ve got a disarticulated set of Baines Lancaster on the shelves. It’s priced at £60. Would you take £40 for it?’ I had to look up ‘disarticulated’ shortly after I’d told him that his offer was not agreeable.
Till Total £650
19 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 29 APRIL
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Today’s missing book was The Mystical Flora of St Francis de Sales, priced at £75. An early listing. These are always the hardest to find, as the longer the book has been on the shelf, the higher the chance that it has been sold (and not de-listed) or moved to a different shelf by a customer.
A Glaswegian woman, wearing a pair of trousers so incredibly tight (and flesh-coloured) that I initially thought she was naked from the waist down, asked for a map of the area so that she could ‘avoid the roads’. By which, it turns out, she means the single-track roads. She’s the wife of the motor home owner.
A customer wandered about the shop for an hour this afternoon repeating to his wife ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything in German’ before leaving without asking whether – in fact – we had anything in German. It’s tempting to interject and point out that we do have a section of German-language books, but to be honest, in these situations, if the customer doesn’t even have the sense to ask, then there’s probably only the slenderest of chances that they’d buy something.
Went to the pub after work to meet Samara, who’s running The Open Book for two weeks.
Till Total £78
5 Customers
THURSDAY, 30 APRIL
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Katarina (the photographer who used the shop for a shoot) sent me some of the photographs. I had no idea that her willowy model was going to be nude for the entire shoot.
Till Total £67
6 Customers
MAY
It is queer how my fancy is tickled by the oddities of human nature. Perhaps this happens because I am so ordinary myself. It would give me the shivers if I thought I was kenspeckle, or that folk considered me eccentric in any way. I hope I give them no cause to talk about any oddity of mine behind my back. In the shop I once heard a University student, a very rude young man, mutter to his companion ‘Go and ask that funny-looking tyke.’ At first I thought he was meaning me, for he was looking in my direction, but presently I noticed that McKerrow was directly behind me. It must have been McKerrow that was referred to. The old fellow can’t help his looks.
Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller
Of course the student was referring to Baxter as a ‘funny-looking tyke’, but his observation that his fancy is tickled by the oddities of human nature is probably a result of working in a bookshop for several decades. I shudder to think what most of my customers think of me, but I suspect ‘funny-looking tyke’ would be at the more flattering end of the descriptive spectrum.
Most retail involves dealing with all manner of people but, as Orwell pointed out in his essay Bookshop Memories, ‘Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop.’ It seems to be a common thread of books that are set in or which are about bookshops that the writers seem to group customers into almost Linnaean taxonomic groups: R. M. Williamson did it in Bits from an Old Bookshop in 1904; Will Y. Darling did it in The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller in 1931; Orwell did it in Bookshop Memories; and Augustus Muir did it with Baxter in 1942. And, in a more generous manner, Jen Campbell did it with Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops in 2012. Perhaps everyone does it, but it seems somehow easier to categorise customers in a bookshop; people seem to fit more neatly into boxes, possibly because you can form a sense of what a person is like from the books they buy, although Darling contradicts this in The Bankrupt Bookseller, saying, ‘Some of my customers are frankly a mystery to me, and the darkness of their mystery is not lightened by the books they buy.’
It is probably less about the books they buy, and more about the human interaction that Darling is describing, and – very broadly speaking – people can be divided into two groups: those who have worked in a bar, or café, or restaurant, or shop, and those who have not. And while it would be both unfair and untrue to say that everyone in the latter category treats those in the former as a second-class citizen, it is probably accurate to say that virtually nobody from the first category will do so.
FRIDAY, 1 MAY
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 1
Nicky was in the shop today, so I packed up and left for Edinburgh for Alastair Reid’s memorial service, which took place at 6 p.m. in part of the university. I drove to Lockerbie, left the van and took the train to Edinburgh rather than driving. Alastair was a hugely talented writer, originally from Galloway (a place to which he returned every spring in his twilight years). He became a good friend during that time, and he will be terribly missed in these and many other parts. Finn, Eliot and a host of other people were at the memorial service. After the event I went to my youngest sister, Lou’s, at about 10.30 p.m. and drank whisky with her husband, Scott, for a while, then bed by midnight.
The AWB (Association of Wigtown Booksellers) Spring Festival started today. This is a small festival with a tiny budget, organised by the booksellers. We usually have a dozen or so talks and events held in various venues – mainly bookshops – around the town, and it’s always on the weekend of the May Bank Holiday.
Till Total £126.60
9 Customers
SATURDAY, 2 MAY
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Awoken at 7 a.m. by Daniel and Martha, Lou and Scott’s children, playing outside my door. Left at 9 a.m. and headed for Waverley Station, via a café for breakfast. I arrived at the station to discover that all trains to Lockerbie had been cancelled and buses had been put on instead. Rather than the pleasant one-hour train journey I had expected, we were sardined onto a pretty uncomfortable bus, where immediately a scrawny man deposited himself on the seat next to mine and proceeded to spend the entire journey sniffing, sometimes several times a second, both in and out. The journey took two and a half hours before the bus finally snailed its way into Lockerbie.
Returned to the shop at about 3.30 p.m. to a scowling Nicky: ‘You told me you’d be back by lunchtime.’ I apologised and sent her home early. Just before she left, a regular customer brought in a box of books. They were mostly things I wouldn’t stock, but I bought a few things. Nicky spotted a battered Book Club edition of Poldark in the box which I had rejected. There ensued an argument in which she insisted that it would sell. When I told her that we’d had multiple copies of Winston Graham in the Penguin section for years but never sold a single copy of Poldark, she ignored me and gave the man a pound, telling me, ‘This will sell by the end of next week.’
The shop was busy all afternoon, and I spent the last hour tidying up the predictable chaos to which I had returned.
I think the cat has worms, so I dug out the worming tablets, at the sight of which he shot off like a bolt of lightning.
Till Total £375.98
35 Customers
SUNDAY, 3 MAY
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
I opened the shop at 11 a.m. to find
a customer waiting outside: a man with a beard, who on entering the shop asked, ‘Have you got anything special in mountaineering?’ I replied that it was quite a subjective question – ‘special’ could mean different things to different people – to which he responded ‘Well, I suppose I mean expensive’, so I told him to just double the price of the books on the shelves. He eventually explained that he’s a dealer who specialises in polar exploration books.
The wonderfully named Ayrshire local historian Dane Love arrived to give a talk about his latest book, The Galloway Highlands. Thankfully it was a wet day and the event was well attended, with about thirty people turning up. Unfortunately, being on my own running the shop, I was unable to attend Dane’s talk, and shortly after it started, a customer came to the counter with a book: ‘This book has three price stickers on it, which one is yours?’ One of the stickers had ‘WATERSTONES’ on it, another ‘OXFAM’.
The days are noticeably lengthening, and – though still chilly – the air temperature is rising, to the point at which I no longer need to light the stove in the evening.
Till Total £330.98
26 Customers
MONDAY, 4 MAY
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
All three orders today were from Abe, so I processed them and took the mail sacks to the post office, arriving there to discover that it was closed because of the Bank Holiday.
As I was pricing up books, I came across one by a woman called Kay Brellend. I sincerely hope the ‘R’ key works on her typewriter.
To my fury, and doubtless to Nicky’s delight, the first customer of the day bought the copy of Poldark that she had bought on Saturday. I am choking back bitter tears as I type this.
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 11