Confessions of a Bookseller

by Shaun Bythell

  Till Total £357.37

  44 Customers

  TUESDAY, 26 MAY

  Online orders: 2

  Orders found: 2

  Callum was in at 9 a.m. to work on the bothy.

  Today I sold a book called The 100 Most Pointless Things in the World for £2.50. It was a hardback a year old in a mint dust jacket, original price £14.99. Nicky had priced it at £2.50. I would have had it at £6.50. Her argument that we should price to compete with Amazon doesn’t stand up when so much is available for a penny there. I’m going to try to persuade her that we shouldn’t be considering penny listings, but instead think of what the book would cost if it was brand new today, and divide that by three.

  An Amazon customer emailed to say that he was disappointed because the book that he ordered from us does not have a dust jacket, unlike the one in the photograph on the Amazon listing. I explained that Amazon uses generic stock photographs, and that there were twelve other copies of the same book on that listing. They couldn’t all possibly be that very same copy.

  A man who looked exactly like Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army came to the counter and said ‘I’m 89 and I live in Minnigaff. I’m moving house and I’ve got a lot of books to get rid of. Is there a market for second-hand books?’

  Till Total £193.98

  16 Customers

  WEDNESDAY, 27 MAY

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 1

  Callum came in at 10 a.m. to work on the Garden Room conversion. As he was walking through the shop he sarcastically commented that the place was busy. There wasn’t a soul in the shop but the two of us.

  At 11 a.m. a customer brought in a box of books, ‘All first editions’. They were all first editions, but mainly things like Dick Francis, which are largely worthless because they were produced in such huge numbers, but I picked out a few Miss Read and Terry Pratchett novels, and an interesting old book on the Sandwich Islands. There are only two online, and the cheapest is £200. I’ve listed ours for £125.

  It started to rain heavily this afternoon and the shop – previously quiet – suddenly filled with customers. Callum came through to ask me a question about the position of a door at this point. There must have been forty people in the shop. When he eventually made it to the counter, inching through the crowded shop, I reminded him of his words of this morning: ‘Busy in here, isn’t it?’

  A very tall French woman bought £4.50 worth of books and insisted on paying by card, and covering the entire PIN handset with her hand so that nobody could see her number, even though there was nobody other than me in the room at the time. After she’d gone, Mole-Man appeared, scuttling past the counter into the history section where he began his literary excavations, before moving silently into the railway room. By the time he came to the counter his pile of books had reached a dozen, and – clutching the base against his belly – they almost reached his nose. It was the usual eclectic mix and included an odd volume (volume 5) of Virginia Woolf’s Diary, a book on the history of mining in County Durham, three Penguin novels by Evelyn Waugh and an illustrated book of the misericords in Bristol Cathedral, among others. As he was plunging his hands into various pockets in an effort to extract the correct amount of cash, I noticed that a large drip had formed on the end of his nose, and I watched with fascination as it lengthened and began to swing pendulously to mirror his movements. Fortunately, shortly before gravity was to have a final say in its destiny, he deftly ran his sleeve over the tip of his nose, and transferred it to the less than absorbent polyester of his jacket before passing me the £37 required to cover the cost of his books.

  Till Total £429.83

  45 Customers

  THURSDAY, 28 MAY

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 1

  There was a reply from Monsoon in today’s emails telling me that I’m getting orders for books we’ve already sold due to a technical problem with Amazon, and that I need to delist and relist my entire stock. All done at the click of a mouse, apparently.

  When I opened the shop this morning, the small, bearded Irishman was sitting on the bench waiting for me. I know little about him other than that he comes in his large, battered blue van two or three times a year and sells me books, usually fairly interesting stock and in decent condition. I’m pretty sure he sleeps in his van, although it has not a single trapping of luxury: not even a mattress. He’s a quiet man, and I would say that if you described him as ‘feral’ he would be quite flattered. I bought six boxes of mixed stock and gave him £180.

  Heavy rain last night, so I checked river levels and the Cree is 3ft 6in., which means that the Minnoch would have been perfect this afternoon, so I emailed my father to see if he wanted to go fishing. He replied saying that his back is too bad. I’ve never known him to miss an opportunity to go salmon fishing.

  Just before lunch a man came in and asked if I wanted to buy some books – ‘I’ve got three bags, then the same again.’ So, six bags. It turned out to be a collection of very saleable modern paperback fiction in mint condition, including a copy of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, which I recall an old flatmate from my time in Bristol recommending. I’ve never read any Martin Amis, so I put it on my ever expanding ‘To Be Read’ pile.

  As I was sorting books on the table, an elderly customer decided to sit on it, despite there being seven chairs placed throughout the shop.

  Till Total £323.90

  32 Customers

  FRIDAY, 29 MAY

  Online orders: 2

  Orders found: 2

  One of the orders today was for the Sandwich Islands book. A quick turnaround is always both a relief and a reassurance that you’ve bought and sold something at roughly the right price. Customers often come to the shop with a book they want to sell and tell you that they’ve seen a copy on Abe for several hundred pounds. A quick check usually reveals that there are dozens more, ranging in price from £10 to hundreds. Even the copy at £10 is probably overpriced because it’s still there.

  Nicky was in today, so inevitably the day began with an argument about the books the Irishman had brought in, for which I had paid £180. They were pretty average, and I threw about a quarter of them out. The first thing she did was to start going through the books that I had rejected, despite the fact that we have a massive backlog of about thirty boxes of decent fresh stock to sort through.

  In the front of the shop is a beautiful Georgian bureau which I bought from the Dumfries saleroom about two years ago. The lid is open, but several times today I noticed that Nicky had closed it, claiming that ‘Wee children keep bashing their heads on the corner.’ It has been open for weeks, and no such incident has occurred during that time when I’ve been in the shop.

  Monsoon was still showing our stock as ‘Delisting’ on Amazon. After twenty-four hours I emailed them to ask if this was normal, as the ‘Relist’ button needs to appear for the 10,000 books we have listed on line to be active again.

  After work I went to the pub with Callum.

  Till Total £187.50

  18 Customers

  SATURDAY, 30 MAY

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 1

  Nicky was up early and opened the shop this morning.

  The order today was for one of the books that I had rejected and Nicky had salvaged from the boxes she’d bought from the Irishman. It sold for £30, and she made no attempt to disguise her glee that I had made a mistake.

  While Nicky was on her lunch break, a couple (about my age) came in with two boxes of books that had belonged to the woman’s father. They were in a terrible state, and mostly between 100 and 200 years old. It transpired that her father had been teaching himself how to become a bookbinder and had been going to auctions for a few years, looking for books in poor condition to repair. These were the books he hadn’t got round to before he died last year, and they weren’t sure what to do with them. Because of their condition, there were only a couple that I could have got any money for,
and the cost of repairing them would be prohibitive, so I gave them £20 for them and hopefully I’ll be able to get Christian, the local bookbinder, to repair a couple of them for me in exchange for the rest.

  Over the years, seeing books in this sort of condition has taught me a lot about how books are made. With the boards and spine off an early nineteenth-century book, you can see exactly how the sewing part of the process is done, over the cords which then – once the leather of the binding is hammered over them – become the ‘raised bands’ on the spine. Typically, five is what you’d expect on a leather-bound book of this period. Even the ‘gatherings’ become obvious when you look at a disbound book.

  Traditionally, the size of a book was determined by two factors – the size of the original sheet that the text was printed on, and the number of times it was folded to produce a ‘gathering’, or number of pages:

  1 fold would produce a gathering of 2 leaves, and this is known as folio

  2 folds would produce 4 leaves, making it quarto (abbreviated to 4to)

  3 folds would produce 8 leaves, hence octavo (8vo, the most common size of book, even today)

  4 folds would produce 16 leaves, known as sextodecimo (16mo)

  There are other variations on this: 12mo, 32mo and 64mo.

  Once printed (for an 8vo gathering, the compositor would have to have prepared 16 pages of type, 8 for the top and 8 for the bottom of the sheet), and, folded into a gathering, the numbered gatherings would be placed in the correct order and sewn together over the cords on the spine. Once complete, the binder has the option of trimming the book, which not only gives a uniformity to the edges but also detaches each individual leaf from the others in the gathering. Occasionally books appear where the pages are still joined together (untrimmed), but this is usually just on the fore-edge. The top and bottom edges are nearly always trimmed.

  After Nicky had gone I poured myself a G&T, then went into the garden and started reading Time’s Arrow. Now that spring is here and the days are lengthening, and the ground is beginning to warm under the sun, quiet evenings in the garden are once again an appealing way to pass the time after a day in the shop.

  Till Total £189.99

  16 Customers

  JUNE

  It is mostly old theology we get from the Cloth, and they are dumbfounded when we offer them thirty-five shillings or so for the lot. They usually write back in a fine huff, and tell us that they paid more than that, forty years back, Cruden’s Concordance and Smith’s Travels in the Holy Land. Cruden still sells for a few shillings, but they can’t understand that old theology is – well, just old theology. I nearly told a minister the other day that the best use I could think of for these old tomes was to dig them into the garden for manure.

  Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller

  Not much has changed in this regard since Muir wrote these words. Theology remains a difficult subject to sell: even Cruden doesn’t shift from the shelves these days. Most of the theological collections I’ve acquired have not been from the ministers themselves but from their widows, who are often just keen to be rid of them to make space for other things. But ministers’ widows aren’t the only people who try to sell us theology; on an almost daily basis we are approached by people wielding enormous Victorian family Bibles, often elaborately bound and with metal clasps. They must have cost a pretty penny in their day. Bunyan is the same. There is an abundance of old copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress out there but, again, largely worthless. There is no market for them today, and I can’t see it ever recovering. Very early theology, though, does have a value, but that’s largely because of its antiquity: a single page from the Gutenberg Bible (1455) sold for $74,000 at an auction in 2007. This, though, is exceptional, and its value is in the fact that it was the first book ever printed using movable alloy type.

  When it comes to customers, we are often asked for theology, or ‘religious books’ or – more common still – ‘Christian books’ but the customers rarely buy anything. More frequently nowadays, we are asked for books on spirituality and eastern religion. Of those who ask for theology, the overwhelming majority have Northern Irish accents, doubtless in part because of our geographical proximity to the province where interest in matters theological is kept alive thanks to the fact that for many people there religion, politics and identity are grimly intertwined. More often than not these customers are after post-Reformation literature attacking Rome.

  Aside from theological libraries, the other single-subject collections that we’re often offered are law libraries. Over the years I’ve bought several of these, although I’m not sure I’d touch another one unless it contained something very interesting. Generally, they are made up of Scots Law Times reports and Public Statutes. Normally, they are in calf bindings and if I’m lucky I can sell them to someone who has a library to fill with attractive-looking books or, as once, to a company that builds sets for films. Their value is purely as bindings.

  MONDAY, 1 JUNE

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 1

  Email in this morning from someone who has clearly never been to the shop:

  Dear The Bookshop,

  Firstly, I’d just like to say what an exquisite shop you have.

  I absolutely love The Bookshop’s focus on unique, quality goods and innovative design – it’s precisely these qualities, in fact, that have inspired me to reach out here.

  Unsurprisingly he was a self-published author trying to persuade me to stock copies of his novel about mermaids, or fairies, or some such nonsense. He can ‘reach out’ elsewhere.

  Jeff the minister called in at 11 a.m. During the warmer weather he travels on an electric bicycle rather than the bus – his winter mode of transport. He told me that his sermon on Sunday was about the perils of infidelity, inspired by a rumour that he’d heard about one of his parishioners.

  Spent an hour on the telephone to the Royal Mail helpdesk after unsuccessfully setting up their DMO system to replace the clunky dinosaur that is OBA. Finally had everything in place and up and running only to discover that the much promoted DMO is even worse than OBA. The Royal Mail’s legacy of being publicly owned is that it appears to have a profound affection for abbreviations. I have no idea what any of them stand for. These systems are unquestionably designed by people who never have to use them.

  Till Total £330

  29 Customers

  TUESDAY, 2 JUNE

  Online orders: 2

  Orders found: 2

  Two orders, one Abe and one Amazon. Municipal Buildings of Edinburgh, a beautiful Victorian architectural hardback with bevelled edges, gilt titles and 13 plates, 1895 sold for £60. The Amazon order was for a small, unremarkable paperback titled Antar, the FV12000 Series British Army Service – a book about a military vehicle that sold for £58. The days in which the former could be reasonably safely assumed to be worth around £50 while the latter would perhaps reach £8 are long behind us. Now it could easily be the other way around, and it’s almost impossible to pick out the valuable modern paperbacks from the crowd without checking almost everything online.

  An old woman came to the counter and said, ‘Can you help me? I’m looking for a book but I can’t remember the title. It’s called The Red Balloon.’ A predictably confused conversation followed.

  Mr Deacon came in just before closing and bought a biography of Nelson. He’s never a chatty man, but today he didn’t even say hello.

  Till Total £322.97

  23 Customers

  WEDNESDAY, 3 JUNE

  Online orders: 7

  Orders found: 6

  Seven orders this morning. There must be a surge after delisting and relisting the Monsoon database on Amazon.

  Isabel was in to do the accounts. She found a black cat in the office. We spent ten minutes chasing the little bastard around the shop.

  Two American pensioners came in at three o’clock wearing nauseatingly tight Lycra cycling gear. They did what al
l cyclists do, which is to go straight to the Ordnance Survey maps, have a good look at them and plan a route, then leave empty-handed. More American cyclists came in later, one of whom spent a good deal of time telling me that you can use old books to make interesting craft objects. If Nicky had been here they would have waffled on together for hours.

  Picked up my copy of The New Confessions from the ‘To Be Read’ pile again and read some more of it after work. I normally read a book right through once I’ve started it, but I appear to be interspersing this with other books. Perhaps I’m subconsciously trying to make it last longer. It’s remarkably similar to Any Human Heart in some respects, although John James Todd (the narrator) lacks some of Logan Mountstuart’s charm. It is a narrative of a full and fascinating life. He has now joined the army and is experiencing some of the full horrors of the First World War. Will return it to the ‘To Be Read’ pile and resume later. The way the book is structured oddly lends it to being read in this way; it’s almost like several books in one. At almost 600 pages it could easily be several books.

  Till Total £154

  12 Customers

  THURSDAY, 4 JUNE

  Online orders: 4

  Orders found: 3

  Callum was in today to work on the bothy. It’s getting closer to completion, but I don’t think it will be ready in time for Emanuela.

  An Australian man came to the counter mid-morning and told me that he’d got a bargain in a shop in Sydney; a five-volume set of Scott’s Waverley novels in poor condition, published in 1841. He asked me what I would sell them for, so I told him £20 at the very most. He looked crestfallen. He’d paid £23 and was convinced that he’d bagged something worth a fortune. Waverley novels – however old – are rarely worth much unless they’re in a fine binding. They are ubiquitous and have undergone so many reprints that – like Burns – very few editions of them have any value. The rule of thumb for Burns is that, if they were published before his death (1796), then they probably have some value. After that they decline dramatically. Burns has one principal bibliographer, J. W. Egerer, and the list of editions of Burns’s works he details in his book is astonishing. Several years ago a customer came to the counter with a very tatty two-volume set of Burns from about 1820. He asked me what I thought it would cost to rebind it, so I told him that it would probably be cheaper just to throw it away and buy a replacement set of the same edition. His unexpected response was to shout ‘How dare you! This belonged to my great grandfather!’ Quite how he expected me to be privy to that information, I have no idea.