Till Total £202.96
25 Customers
SATURDAY, 18 JULY
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Nicky opened the shop. She had made some sort of concoction that involved chocolate fudge cake, cherry pie, strawberries and yoghurt. Apparently it was ‘healthy’ because of the fruit and yoghurt. I politely declined her kind invitation to try some.
Shortly before lunch a customer marched up to the counter and asked, ‘Is there anyone around here who makes bookcases?’
Me: We made our own, but most joiners will build you a bookcase if you ask them.
Customer: But I’m looking for someone who specialises in them and makes them habitually.
After being told that there was nobody around here who ‘makes them habitually’, he spent a good ten seconds attempting to leave the shop by repeatedly pushing against the door which you have to pull to open.
Till Total £310.47
33 Customers
MONDAY, 20 JULY
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Flo spent most of the day labelling the Random Book Club parcels. We couldn’t find the Royal Mail forty-eight-hour delivery stamp – three of us (me, Flo and Emanuela) spent about two hours looking for it (it’s normally in a plastic box under the counter with all the other mail supplies) – so I took the boxes of parcels to the post office for Wilma to process instead. There were roughly 150 of them. RBC mailing usually works out at about £1.80 per book using the online mailing system we have on contract with Royal Mail. Sending them via the post office they averaged £2.20. Flo’s idiotic comment of the day: ‘Do the Scottish islands count as overseas?’
Flo and Emanuela continued sorting through the boxes from Melrose. They got very excited when they found a set of Golliwog books that were selling online for about £40 each.
Janetta came to clean the shop at 3 p.m., as she does every Monday, and found the missing Royal Mail forty-eight-hour stamp within about five minutes of arriving.
During supper with Anna and Emanuela tonight, Emanuela started complaining about her various ailments. I commented that it was very unusual for someone a mere twenty-five years old to be so afflicted (bad knee, bad back, terrible eyesight), to which she replied, ‘Yes, but I am eighty-five years old inside, like an old granny.’ And in that moment her new nickname was born: ‘Granny’.
Till Total £699.29
53 Customers
TUESDAY, 21 JULY
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
I left Flo and Granny (Emanuela) running the shop to go to the Borders to meet with another childhood friend, Tris, who kindly spent the day teaching me a type of cast that is useful on larger rivers, or where there are trees near the bank. It’s known as the Spey cast. We met up on the River Tweed (about three hours’ drive away). After fishing for a few hours I had tea with him and his wife, Delia, a good friend from my teenage years and former neighbour on the farm on which I grew up. She runs a cafe/gallery in Lilliesleaf, in the Borders. We compared the seasonality of our businesses and the similar trials we face with staffing costs and other things that you only really discover when you’re running a small enterprise in rural Scotland. Back home at 9 p.m. to find that Flo had made a huge display of the Golliwog books. I took them down immediately. They are far from politically correct. In fact, it conflicts me enormously when I’m buying books and come across this sort of thing. They have value, both financial and historical, but who knows into whose hands they will fall: possibly those of someone with a curious historical interest in attitudes to skin colour or someone who wishes to use them in a contemporary context either to ridicule them or to raise issues of racial prejudice – or perhaps those of a racist. Certainly, I don’t want visitors to the shop to be greeted with an enormous display of them.
Till Total £299.67
30 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 22 JULY
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Only one order today. Flo spent the day listing books on FBA. She managed 120 yesterday, but among them were things that I don’t imagine will ever sell for more than a penny on Amazon, but for which Monsoon is bringing up prices of £5 or £6, such as Edwina Currie’s autobiography. I should probably sit down with Flo and explain this: Nicky intrinsically understands, probably from working in the shop for so long, but Flo will happily put a P. G. Wodehouse in the bin if Monsoon shows that it is available on Amazon for a penny, despite every one of his titles selling like hot cakes in the shop for £2 or £3, even in tatty paperbacks.
Isabel came in to do the accounts.
In the afternoon I showed Flo how to complete the FBA shipment and organise UPS to come and collect the eleven boxes of books she’s now listed, so that they’ll end up in Amazon’s Dunfermline warehouse and hopefully start selling from there.
Granny has taken to doing a sort of mafia thing where she points at her own eyes, then at mine, then makes a cutting throat gesture when I do something she disapproves of. Mercifully, her boots have a large, hard heel, and she sounds like a marching army as she clomps around the shop, so I can hear her approaching well in advance and take evasive action. When I pointed this out to her, she replied, ‘Oh yes, I am very elephant-a’.
Till Total £254.48
27 Customers
THURSDAY, 23 JULY
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Flo was in again. She proudly announced that she’s mastered a new facial expression, which she had clearly spent a good deal of time working on in front of a mirror last night. It’s a cross between a scowl and a pout. Tried to come up with a name for it. So far it’s either ‘scout’ or ‘powl’. I asked for whose benefit she had been working on this charming new look, and she admitted that she has a ‘secret’ boyfriend.
Despite the fact that it was a warm, sunny day, Granny spent a good deal of it complaining about the temperature. She has decided that her eyesight is getting worse, and took off her glasses to demonstrate: ‘Everyfink are just-a colours, no shapes.’
The UPS driver came at noon to pick up the eleven boxes to be delivered to the Amazon warehouse.
Will, my neighbour, called round to complain that the noise of the boiler is keeping him awake at night, so I emailed Solarae to see if Ashley could come and have a look at it.
This weekend is Wickerman, a music festival near Dundrennan (about 40 miles away). Zoe Bestel, a talented local singer/songwriter is performing. The festival has been going for about fifteen years and attracts some pretty big names these days. Peter, Zoe’s father, asked if he could borrow the van for the weekend, and picked it up just before I closed the shop. Flo’s off there tomorrow for the weekend.
Till Total £275.80
39 Customers
FRIDAY, 24 JULY
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Granny was pricing books up when she came across a book called Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. The title page has – scrawled in pencil in what bears a suspiciously close resemblance to Nicky’s handwriting – the words ‘Mother of Jesus, not God’.
Granny and I had a discussion about the condition of secondhand books. From my perspective as a dealer, I like them to be in as good a condition as possible, but Granny has a different, and more interesting view. She told me, ‘I like to read-a books-a which have been read by many, many people. I love-a the folded corners of books-a because it makes me wonder what caused the person to stop-a reading at this point? What-a happened? Did the cat need-a to be fed? Did the police-a knock on the door-a to tell you that your husband had been killed? Or did you just need-a to go for a piss? All of these-a things, all of them make you fink about-a the other people who have read-a this book.’
Till Total £254.99
26 Customers
SATURDAY, 25 JULY
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Nicky’s first comment
of the day was ‘Ooh, I got you a lovely pastry from the Morrison’s skip. It’s got Belgian chocolate and caramelised sea salt.’
Me: You ate it on the way in, didn’t you?
Nicky: Aye.
Telephone call mid-morning from Davy Brown reminding me that I’d agreed to lend him the van on Monday morning. I’d forgotten all about it. Peter Bestel is at the Wickerman festival with it. Hopefully it will be back by Monday morning.
It was a glorious day, so after lunch I left Nicky and Granny in the shop, and cycled to New Luce, round trip of 55 miles.
Peter Bestel dropped the van off at 5 p.m., thankfully.
Till Total £174
22 Customers
MONDAY, 27 JULY
Online orders: 5
Orders found: 5
Anna is off on a short trip to Amsterdam to meet up with some of her friends. She dropped Granny off at Lockerbie so that she could go to Edinburgh for a few days of ‘touristic’.
The first customers of the week were a family of five who spent an hour browsing then left empty-handed, complaining that ‘There’s too much choice.’
Flo telephoned in sick. Apparently she’s not well following a tequila bender at the Wickerman festival, so I called Nicky, who agreed to come in. In the old days the girls (students) would turn up regardless of how hungover, or even still drunk, they were. I’m hard pressed to remember a day when her predecessor, Sara Pearce, failed to turn up to work under some form of intoxication. I never thought that I’d miss her. I once came down into the shop after lunch to find that she had taken a photograph of herself, framed it and written ‘Employee of the Month’ on it. It was sitting proudly on the counter.
Old friend Chris Brown and his family came to the shop. They live in China, so we made a short video outside the shop with his daughter speaking in Mandarin, to appeal to the people in China who apparently love the Reader’s Delight video. Lara, my friend Colin’s daughter, came with them and stayed behind when they left: she’s here for a week’s work experience.
Till Total £527.45
45 Customers
TUESDAY, 28 JULY
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Heavy rain overnight and into the day. Flo limped in just after 9 a.m., looking rough, so I went to the river and left her to show Lara the ropes.
When I returned at 3 p.m., I found the Irishman waiting there with seven boxes of books about trains and buses, so I gave him £140 for them.
Both Robert (plumber) and Callum were in today, working on the bothy.
Till Total £414.99
41 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 29 JULY
Online orders: 7
Orders found: 4
Glorious sunny day. Flo was in again, finally back to her usual scowling, pouting self. Callum was in to work on the bothy. Robert, the plumber, arrived at 9 a.m.
Flo and I sorted the books from The Barony and we loaded the forty-seven boxes of recycled and rejected stock into the van, and I drove it up to the recycling plant in Glasgow. After I’d dumped the books at the Smurfit Kappa plant, I headed straight back home. Arrived just after the shop had shut.
Ashley from Solarae telephoned to say that he’d had to replace the fan on the boiler that was keeping Will awake all night. Once he’d stripped it down, he discovered a decapitated blackbird wedged in the blades. It must have fallen down the flue.
Till Total £197
32 Customers
THURSDAY, 30 JULY
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
Robert, the plumber, was working on the hot water tank in the bothy. My brand new pellet boiler has a brand new fault; the water pressure in the buffer tank has dropped. Robert reluctantly admitted that it might be because he has been messing about with the plumbing.
Till Total £467
35 Customers
FRIDAY, 31 JULY
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Nicky in this morning.
I discovered that Flo hadn’t checked the Amazon Seller Central messages all week and we had multiple complaints, so I showed her how to access them and deal with each one. Most sellers live in perpetual fear of being suspended from Amazon, and it doesn’t take much for them to – seemingly arbitrarily – kick you off.
Granny showed me her fingers, the tips of which (around the nails) were inflamed and swollen. She thinks it is from handling dusty books. Another ailment to add to her comprehensive list.
Till Total £212.69
23 Customers
AUGUST
I say that these old fellows are the very backbone of the book trade. As they drop off one by one, like leaves from a tree, there is a gap which no modern pushful young salesman can fill, and they leave a memory that is a good deal more fragrant than the smelly hair-oil of those Smart Alecs who come asking me for a job in the confident tone of one who is quite prepared to teach me my own business. I salute old McKerrow and his colleagues as they pass from our midst.
Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller
Old McKerrow and his colleagues have largely passed from our midst, but a few of them remain. What they’ve been replaced by, though, is not Smart Alecs, slick with smelly hair oil, but a faceless behemoth that has sucked the humanity out of second-hand (and new) bookselling. The backbone of the book trade of which Muir speaks is all but gone, and the business is in danger of becoming an invertebrate. I write this just a few hours after an old friend from Edinburgh dropped in to say hello with her elderly father. He wandered through the shop with a look of nostalgia, occasionally touching a book, and looking wistfully around with the amazement of a child who has entered a sweetshop for the first time. As they were leaving to go for lunch with some mutual friends, he came to the counter and said: ‘You know, Edinburgh used to be filled with places like this. I spent my life wandering about them and building up my library. I bought a sixteenth-century copy of Holinshed’s Chronicle – you have a later edition, I see – in a bookshop in Leith in the 1940s. I remember it clearly. They’re all gone now, all but a small handful.’
Collecting books was clearly an important part of his life, and without bookshops there is little joy to be found in this pursuit. The serendipity of finding something you didn’t know even existed, or asking a bookseller what they could recommend on a particular subject, isn’t really possible online yet, although I expect it will come. A couple of years ago I approached Napier University with an idea for that very thing; a 3D model of the shop through which avatars could wander, controlled by online customers, and look at the actual stock on the shelves and even interact with one another. They told me that it would require technology that has yet to be developed. In a way I’m glad it isn’t there yet, but I doubt if it will be long before it is. Still, the smell, the atmosphere and the human interaction will remain the exclusive preserve of bricks-and-mortar bookshops. Perhaps, like vinyl and 35mm film, there might be a small revival, enough to keep a few of us afloat for a bit longer.
SATURDAY, 1 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Nicky in. The first thing she did was to hoist her sandalled foot onto the counter and show me her toe, onto which she had dropped a large piece of timber. The little toe was, in fairness, black and blue. Shortly afterwards, this was her Facebook update on the shop’s page:
Nicky here!
This morning’s ding-dong went like this … ‘Why have you priced up that huge box of maps & put them neatly on the shelves? and why do you keep promoting “Tripe” & “Rockets”, the customers are buying loads of copies and who cares if you’ve broken your toes, just work faster.’
Telephone call at 10 a.m. from Solarae. Rob, the boss, told me how to reset the boiler, which I did. It promptly overheated and cut out again.
In the afternoon I went to the post office to pick up a copy of The Guardian and discovered from the girls there that there’s a rumour about the ne
arby Bladnoch Distillery, which went into liquidation last year (the most southerly distillery in Scotland, and consequently the most southerly Scotch distillery in the world), has been bought by an Australian millionaire.
Granny appeared wearing a new pair of white archival gloves which she claimed would protect her swollen fingers from the ravages of handling books. When I told her that she looked like Michael Jackson, she called me a ‘fucking bastard’.
Till Total £187.93
38 Customers
MONDAY, 2 AUGUST
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 2
Flo in, half asleep and more cross than usual.
Drove to Gatehouse (20 miles) after lunch, dropping Granny off at Newton Stewart on the way. She wanted to go for a walk. Headed on to look at books in a house in the grounds of the Cally Palace Hotel – an old lady who is moving into sheltered housing. This is frequently how I acquire stock, and always a salutary reminder of one’s own mortality. There is a depressing sense of resignation that this really is the final chapter when an elderly person takes that step, although in this case the woman appeared to be looking forward to it. I took three boxes of mixed stock and gave her £100.
Captain has a nemesis who sneaks in through the cat-flap and eats his lunch. Today Granny heard them fighting downstairs. I probably shouldn’t mention it to Anna, as it will only further contribute to her already extensive bundle of neuroses.
Granny got home at 6 p.m.
Till Total £199.78
21 Customers
TUESDAY, 3 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 0
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 18