Fibre-optic engineer turned up at 10 a.m. and installed the new wiring for super-fast broadband.
Carol-Ann arrived at about two o’clock to run the shop while I’m away for her fiancé Craig’s stag weekend. We’re sailing in the Clyde. I drove up and stayed with friends near Ayr. I’ll meet them early tomorrow morning on the boat in the marina.
Till Total £229.54
21 Customers
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE
Online orders:
Orders found:
Arrived at the marina at 8 a.m. to find everyone looking pretty hungover. They’d been drinking on the boat last night. We set sail at noon from Largs and headed for Tarbert, on the Cowal peninsula. Arrived at about 5 p.m. with a following wind in fairly pleasant conditions. Moored up and went to a bar, where Craig, considerably the worse for wear from the previous night, managed to drink less than a quarter of a pint.
Till Total £230
17 Customers
SATURDAY, 6 JUNE
Online orders:
Orders found:
Telephone call at 10 a.m. from Carol-Ann to say that the landline in the shop is dead and the credit card machine isn’t working. This can only be related to the fibre-optic technician messing about with things, so I told her to call my broadband supplier and the phone company to sort it out.
Tremendously windy wet day, so we stayed in Tarbert until about 3 p.m., then set sail for Portavadie on the opposite side of the bay. Managed to rip the mainsail as we were putting it up. Limped into Portavadie and went for a meal and a few drinks in the fancy new marina they’ve built there.
Till Total £310.98
36 Customers
SUNDAY, 7 JUNE
Online orders:
Orders found:
Up reasonably early and sailed back to Largs. Cleared the boat and headed back to Wigtown. Home by 6 p.m.
MONDAY, 8 JUNE
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Today was Flo’s first day of working in the shop for the summer. The telephone and credit card machines were still out of action at lunchtime, so I checked all the new sockets and discovered that there was a cable that should have been plugged in but wasn’t, so I connected it and everything worked again.
I logged on to the shop’s Amazon seller account to check messages to find that, because of some new legislation, we now have to give them something called a Unique Business Code, a scan of my passport and a scan of a bank statement linked to the account into which they pay us their paltry pittance every fortnight. Failure to do so will result in the account being suspended and no sales online, so I emailed the Inland Revenue and requested a UBC. I suspect that the purpose of it is to tighten up the behaviour of Amazon, but it will inevitably have the consequence of penalising small businesses, onto whom Amazon dumps any extra costs.
Till Total £265.50
24 Customers
TUESDAY, 9 JUNE
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 2
Flo was in today, the day was warm and sunny: the diametric opposite to her disposition. By lunchtime she hadn’t uttered a single word in answer to my questions or requests, merely a series of shrugs and grunts in response.
Callum came in. He’s working as many hours as he can in an effort to complete the bothy conversion before Emanuela arrives.
A woman called into the shop and made a massive fuss about the condition of a £4 book. She’d found it online and had decided to come to the shop to see it before she invested such a vast sum. When she brought it to the counter and started complaining about the torn jacket, and the previous owner’s signature, I showed her the listing, in which every defect she’d complained about was outlined. She refused to pay more than £2 for it, so I relisted it at £8 (the next cheapest copy online is £12).
The book in question was called The Princess in the Castle, published in 1885 by the Religious Tract Society. Their books always look interesting and possibly valuable at first glance, but as soon as you see the name of the publisher, you can guarantee that they’ll be worth very little. The Religious Tract Society was established in 1799 with the intention of evangelising women, children and the poor. Their later publications – from about 1850 onwards – are fairly saccharine and preachy. The Princess in the Castle, for example, contains a story called ‘The Boy Who Obeyed His Mother’. I’ve got about a dozen RTS books on the shelves, but I can’t recall ever selling one.
Spent the evening reading Time’s Arrow.
Till Total £166.38
9 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 10 JUNE
Online orders: 5
Orders found: 3
Another hot day, sun shining. Flo made it in on time. Callum came in shortly afterwards.
I came downstairs with a cup of tea for Flo at 11 a.m. to find her staring in open-mouthed horror at a man wearing an unusual red beret. Her withering sartorial critique is usually directed towards me, so it was a refreshing change to see her glare directed at someone else.
Callum and I spent most of the day working in the bothy. At one point we were putting up some plasterboard when a customer appeared in the doorway – to get to which involved scrambling over rubble and building materials. He asked Callum ‘Is this the Garden Room?’, to which he replied that no, he had walked straight past the Garden Room. Customer replied ‘Oh, is it through the door which has “Garden Room” written on it?’
Till Total £223.99
17 Customers
THURSDAY, 11 JUNE
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 0
Flo was in the shop today, surly and uncommunicative as always.
Till Total £40.50
7 Customers
FRIDAY, 12 JUNE
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Hot sunny day. Nicky was in, but thankfully without a Foodie Friday treat. Callum came in just after 9 a.m. He’d climbed Cairns-more yesterday, a nearby hill of 2,000 feet and a beautiful walk with stunning views in all directions. Ashley and George appeared at 10.30. Ashley assured me that they would be finished by Tuesday, or Wednesday next week at the latest. Ashley and George are boiler fitters and work for Ashley’s father’s company, Solarae, based in Dumfries. They’re fitting a biomass boiler at the back of the shop.
I spent much of the day helping Callum with the bothy. As the labourer, I was banished up in the crawlspace that passes for a loft, with electrical cables. I managed to rip my T-shirt on a loose nail while I was reversing out of it. It is a hot and hideous space, lined with fibreglass and full of dust. Today, with the summer sun beating down on it, it was almost unbearably still and stifling up there.
No orders from Amazon, so I suspect the account was suspended for non-compliance with the new regulations. The post arrived with the UBC form from the Inland Revenue, so after lunch I spent an hour filling in forms on Amazon. By the end of the day the account status had now changed to ‘Pending’.
After work I took the van to Vincent’s garage for a service then went for a pint with Nicky and Callum. Nicky stayed the night, declining my offer of a comfortable bed in favour of her tramp’s nest in the old warehouse.
Till Total £176.48
16 Customers
SATURDAY, 13 JUNE
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 4
Nicky was up and re-organising the music section when I came down at 9 a.m. She’s unilaterally decided that we should use the space in the sci-fi section for the extra music books which are piled up on the floor. The sci-fi section – unlike most other sections – always appears to have a big gap. It is also one of the hardest sections to keep tidy. Whether this is because it is out of sight of the counter, and people don’t feel they’re being observed, or because sci-fi fans are naturally messy I’m not sure.
All of today’s orders were from Amazon, so the ‘Pending’ status must have been updated. One of the orders was for a book about Hammer studios, whose leading actor, Christop
her Lee, died the day before yesterday.
Today’s post included a letter from the British Library acknowledging receipt of their copy of Tripe Advisor which they requested. Because we ascribed an ISBN to the book when we produced it last year, we are obliged to (like every publisher) to supply a copy free of charge to all of the UK and Ireland’s copyright libraries. There are six of these:
• The British Library, London
• National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
• Bodleian Library, Oxford
• Cambridge University Library
• Trinity College, Dublin
• National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth
After lunch I went to collect the van from Vincent’s, only to find that it was still up on the lift awaiting new brakes, due to arrive on Monday.
Till Total £235.96
23 Customers
MONDAY, 15 JUNE
Online orders: 5
Orders found: 3
Flo in, sarcastic and hostile, as usual.
Callum is working on the bothy, and Ashley and George were also in, putting in the new boiler, plus – at one point – Janetta cleaning the shop. This is going to be an expensive week.
I posted a request on Facebook for further contributors to submit book titles for the concrete book spirals and received five straight away. The idea of using this as a means of funding the planning application was Anna’s and has proved remarkably successful. The concept is that anyone who wants to ‘buy’ a book title can pay £20 and either make up a title or suggest a real one. Ian, at the engravers, then cuts them onto a piece of plastic, and I glue them to the concrete books.
Vincent came round with the van – complete with new brakes – at 3.30.
Finished Time’s Arrow. I loved it – dark and absorbing, and a very unusual narrative device of a life lived backwards. Going to try something by Kingsley Amis next.
Till Total £208.98
23 Customers
TUESDAY, 16 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
At 9 a.m. Flo, Callum, George and Ashley all appeared simultaneously.
I spent the day working with Callum again, mainly back up in the hellish crawlspace that passes for a loft, this time with the water pipes for the new boiler. I spent half an hour up there in the dust and heat trying to push the alkathene pipe through a tiny hole that George had made for it. I emerged, as always, sweating, thirsty and scratching from the dust, so I stole Callum’s cup of tea by way of petty vengeance.
In the early afternoon, as I was helping Callum put some plasterboard on the ceiling, Flo appeared in the bothy:
Flo: There’s a man here to see you.
Me: Who is he?
Flo: Dunno.
Me: What’s it about?
Flo: Dunno.
So I dragged myself into the shop, leaving Callum balanced precariously on a stool trying to drill some drywall screws into the plasterboard above his head, to be met by a grinning old man with a Farmfoods bag full of old People’s Friends.
Till Total £124.49
12 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 17 JUNE
Online orders: 5
Orders found: 3
Flo in at 9 a.m., and Callum was already working on the bothy before I opened the shop. George and Ashley appeared at about 10.30, but not before the electrician, who had been there since 9.30, expecting their arrival. He had to sit in his van until they arrived. No doubt I’m paying for all of this slack time.
The electrician managed to blow the electrics several times and plunge the entire shop into complete darkness. He also caused a minor flood when he inadvertently switched the pump on, and black water blew out of the open pipes which George and Ashley had been working on, soaking poor George.
A customer brought in a box of bound National Geographic magazines from the 1960s while I was out working in the bothy with Callum, so I told Flo to phone and tell him that we don’t take magazines. We’ve tried selling them, but other than 1970s Playboy, Penthouse and Mayfair, they don’t do well at all in the shop. Older magazines – for example, very early Scots Magazine (the first one was issued in 1739) and early Tatler (first published in 1709), and even National Geographic (first issued in 1888) – sell reasonably well, but apart from ’70s soft porn, twentieth-century magazines are a bit of a non-starter. By far the most valuable of the Scots Magazines is the August 1776 issue, which was, I think, the first publication in the world to print the American Declaration of Independence in full.
There was no hot water in the house tonight – no doubt due to the plumbing changes for the new boiler.
In the afternoon I drove Anna to Lockerbie to catch the train to Edinburgh for a film course she’s been invited to attend. The road was closed at Carsluith (about 15 miles from Wigtown) following an accident in which two lorries collided. There was debris everywhere, and the traffic was diverted through the tiny village and along a very narrow road, not remotely suitable for the ferry freight traffic, but we squeezed through and just made it to the train on time. The road was open again by the time I came home.
Till Total £144
10 Customers
THURSDAY, 18 JUNE
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
I came into the shop at 5 p.m. so that Flo could go home and found her staring in fixed horror, this time at a customer in shorts, white socks, pulled right up, and sandals. She was visibly relieved to be going home. She’s fascinated by what she sees as wardrobe transgressions. The man in the red beret last week was almost too much for her, but today’s combination was clearly far worse.
After she’d gone, I started pricing up some books that had come in several months ago, and which included nine volumes of the Highways and Byways series. These were published by Macmillan in the early twentieth century, and were distinctively (and uniformly) bound in blue cloth with gilt titles to the front boards and spines. They were regional guides written by people with comprehensive knowledge of each area, and though they are packed with information, they are quite informally written in the style of a guided tour of each area, and filled with illustrations. Other publishers tried to emulate the success of the series, most notably Hodder and Stoughton with Arthur Mee’s The King’s England series, and Robert Hale with The County Books series but, none of them, for me, comes close to matching the aesthetic, the production values or the content of Highways and Byways.
The volume local to Wigtown, Highways and Byways in Galloway and Carrick, was written by Revd Charles Hill Dick and published in 1916, with illustrations by Hugh Thomson, a well-known artist of the period. Of Wigtown, Dick writes, ‘one looks up to it with a certain respect, not only because the situation is dignified, but also on account of the dust of the martyrs lying in its churchyard’, before examining elements of the town’s history and architecture. He also compares Galloway with Rockall in the way it is overlooked – the forgotten corner of Scotland – a sentiment echoed in a 1950s guide to the region that I recently discovered, which reads: ‘Even for Scottish tourists there is a smack of adventure in invading Galloway on foot or by car, for no other part of Scotland is so far off the beaten track, and, geographically speaking, it is nearer to Ireland and more closely knit to it than to Central Scotland.’
As with most second-hand books, though, they’ve dropped in value over the past fifteen years, and whereas in 2001 I could expect £25 to £30 for a decent copy, nowadays £10 to £15 is all customers are prepared to pay for one.
Till Total £151.75
14 Customers
FRIDAY, 19 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
Nicky arrived in Bluebell, her van, at 9.12 a.m.
George and Ashley came in to commission the new boiler. Now I just have to build a waterproof shelter over it.
We have about twenty boxes of fresh, exciting stock in boxes, which needs to be sorted and shelved. In another corner we have five boxes of books that
are destined for the dump. As always Nicky went straight for the boxes we’re throwing out and started rummaging around in them. For her this is the literary equivalent of the Morrisons skip.
Closed at 5 p.m. and went to the pub with Callum and Bob. In the pub I spotted the woman who is running The Open Book – an American woman who was scribbling in a notebook on the table in the corner. Introduced myself and invited her to join us. She has a bookshop in the States, and after the others had left, she and I chatted about the trials of bookselling in the twenty-first century.
Till Total £260.99
22 Customers
SATURDAY, 20 JUNE
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Nicky arrived late and carrying a small plastic bag, which she thrust in my face and announced, ‘Eh, look at that. I picked them from my garden this morning.’ Expecting some fruit, or at least flowers, I leaned forward to be greeted by a bag of slimy snails and the words ‘I’m putting them in your garden.’ After some negotiation, she agreed to release them in a field.
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 15