Flo was in today. She worked hard yesterday, so I thought I’d start the day with some motivational words of encouragement: ‘Thanks, Flo – you’ve sorted through a lot of books. Well done.’ Flo, after a stunned silence, replied, ‘Can I record you saying that?’
Shortly afterwards, a young woman pushing a pram said, ‘I’m looking for books about tapestry, but not your fancy modern sort of thing. Good, old-fashioned tapestry.’
As Flo and I were sorting through fresh stock, I found another copy of Famous Last Words. My favourite so far is H. G. Wells to his nurse: ‘Go away: I’m all right.’
I went for another walk after work with Granny, and as we passed the field of cows again (Galloway cattle, mostly heifers), one of them had its head over the dyke and was munching on some grass from the verge, so I walked over to it and began to scratch its head. Granny looked terrified and started shouting, ‘What are you do! Pay attention, a-Shone!’, so I assured her that Galloways are good-natured creatures and that she should come over and see, so she tentatively approached and in no time was scratching its head and speaking to it in Italian. Afterwards I asked her if she still thought the cows hate her. She replied, ‘Oh yes, all of them apart from this one. When they look me, they say with their angry eyes “Piss off, this is my field.”’
When we got home, she disappeared upstairs to wash her legs and hair, and came down (as usual) with her turban on while I cooked supper for her and Lara.
Till Total £390.89
36 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 5 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 0
Wigtown agricultural show day. The rain was torrential all day. Granny and Lara filmed the cattle; I filmed the sheep, then left at 3 p.m. and drove to Lairg (six hours’ drive) to go fishing with some friends. Took The New Confessions with me.
Till Total £528.22
52 Customers
THURSDAY, 6 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Fishing. Flo and Granny were in charge of the shop.
Till Total £480
36 Customers
FRIDAY, 7 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Fishing. After a boozy supper I sat by the fire and read The New Confessions for a while. Todd is now a prisoner-of-war, and a German guard (Karl-Heinz) is covertly supplying him with pages from Rousseau’s Confessions in exchange for furtive kisses. Boyd perfectly captures the passion of the voracious reader with this paragraph:
Karl-Heinz ‘fed’ me the entire book over the next seven weeks. The metaphor is exact. The thin wads of pages were like crucial scraps of nutrition. I devoured them. I masticated, swallowed and digested that book. I cracked its bones and sipped its marrow; every fibre of meat, every cartilaginous module of gristle was dined on with gourmandising fervour.
It later transpires that he traded his Red Cross parcels with Karl-Heinz for the second half of the book, saying ‘I gave away my food for a book’. In the shop I have a quotation from Erasmus painted on a wall which reads ‘Whenever I have money I buy books. Whatever is left I spend on food and clothes.’
Till Total £114.94
10 Customers
SATURDAY, 8 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Fished the Oykel all day.
Till Total £349.89
34 Customers
MONDAY, 10 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 0
Flo and Granny packed the books for the next Random Book Club despatch this morning. Granny announced that it is her favourite job ‘to put the book-a in the confection’.
I drove back from Lairg yesterday in the driving rain. This morning, as I was going through the mail that had piled up in my absence, I found a parcel containing a beautiful book that someone had sent me. It was entirely in Chinese apart from the title on the jacket, which was in English. It was called Wanderlust for Books, and it contained several photographs of my shop. It was accompanied by a postcard which read:
Dear Mr Bythell,
I’m Rebecca Lee (in Chinese my name should be Ya-Chen-Lee). I’m a Taiwanese girl who visited Wigtown and your lovely bookstore last summer. Your bookstore and Random Book Club inspired me a lot. After I went back to Taiwan, in order to promote book town concept and memorise my journey of book town culture I wrote my trip down and then published it. I send you a copy of my book, though you may not understand Chinese, but there are some photos of your shop, hope you’ll like it. Sincerely yours, Rebecca. 2015-7-30
Our notoriety in the Orient continues to grow.
Once they’d finished packing random books, Flo and Granny cleared the remainder of the boxes from the Barony deal, and we received another delivery of books from Samye Ling, for which I’ll send them a cheque for £30.
While Granny was working at the counter, a customer approached her and said ‘Uniforms’. Nothing else. She was understandably confused, and trotted out her standard response of ‘Sorry?’ several times until the matter was cleared up slightly.
Before she left, Flo told me that ‘A funny wee man came in when you were away swanning about in the Highlands. I’ve seen him before, but he never says anything, even when I chat to him when he’s paying for books. I’ve made it my mission to try to have a conversation with him.’ Very little further inquiry was required before we had established the identity of the mysterious character as Mole-Man.
Till Total £454.51
36 Customers
TUESDAY, 11 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 0
Flo in shortly after 9 a.m.
After lunch I drove to Port William to look at a private library. A very charming Northern Irish woman showed me around with her husband and her brother. The house had belonged to their parents, and it was completely full of clutter, including thousands of books, nearly all of which were on Christian theology. I picked a few boxes worth and gave them £250. They were very kind about it but clearly disappointed. After further conversation it turned out that they’d been valued fifteen years ago at £1,200. When I explained that the internet had driven book prices down to an almost unsustainable level, they looked both sympathetic and understanding. Her brother even helped me carry the boxes to the van, an occurrence that is surprisingly rare. Their parents, it turns out, had been missionaries and travelled all over the world.
Email from Eliot at five o’clock asking if he could stay tomorrow night. All the bedrooms are occupied, so it’s a full house, with Catriona, Edward (Festival Company trustees who are here for a meeting and need a bed) and Granny, so I made up the sofa bed in the snug for him.
Last week we had two Amazon orders for books we couldn’t find. I emailed a grovelling apology to each customer and refunded them. Here’s the feedback:
Customer 1, 4 stars: ‘Received refund due to non-delivery of item. Settled amicably with seller.’
Customer 2, 1 star: ‘Turned out books not available for sale so order cancelled by supplier not happy at all.’
Closed the shop and went to Rigg Bay for a dip in the sea. It’s warm enough to stay in for about half an hour now, and if you don’t splash about too much, you can see the concentric circles formed by the feeding mullet on the surface of the water all around you.
Once, when I was much younger and barbecues on the beach were a regular feature of the summer, a group of us decided to spend the night there and, during a midnight swim, were delighted to find that the agitated water lit up around us with phosphorescence.
Till Total £360.81
39 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 12 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Flo and Granny opened the shop. Granny’s campaign to organise every element of the shop rigorously has now reached the Shakespeare section, which she has decided to sub-categorise into biography, criticism, collected works and single plays. New members of staff
are almost always obsessed with over-categorisation. When Flo started working, she decided to subdivide the psychology section, which consists of two shelves. There were labels everywhere from ‘Feminism’ to ‘Freud’ to ‘Educational psychology’, to the point that she might as well have written a label for every single book on the shelf. When I explained that customers are intelligent enough to work their way through a couple of hundred books without the need for a mess of labels to distract them, she looked a bit wounded, so I didn’t mention it again.
Jeff the minister appeared at 2 p.m., just as Anna and I were comparing the role of guilt in Catholicism and Judaism. Jeff had been unaware that Anna is Jewish, and when she told him he announced, ‘Oh! My boss is one of your people!’
Eliot arrived at four o’clock. He, Catriona and Edward stayed. At midnight Anna drove us all to the stone circle at Torhouse, where we watched the Perseid meteor shower against a clear sky. Torhouse is a Bronze Age configuration of granite boulders, about 4 miles west of Wigtown. It’s a beautiful place, with views down across the Bladnoch valley, and surrounded by drumlins and copses of trees.
Till Total £241.50
25 Customers
THURSDAY, 13 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Finished Lucky Jim. Flo in today, so I hid, and then went to have my hair cut.
Till Total £320.37
26 Customers
FRIDAY, 14 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Nicky arrived at 9 a.m., and the moment she spotted my haircut she started laughing uncontrollably, telling me, ‘You look like a big poodle!’ Once she’d wiped the tears from her eyes, she shared her news, which was that her Jehovah’s Witness conference had been picketed by born-again Christians. When I asked her why, she replied, ‘They’ve got nothing better to do.’
Callum was in all day, working in the bothy.
I took Granny to lunch at the Steam Packet. She spent the entire time talking about Eliot. ‘Why he stamp-a around everywhere? Why he slam-a de doors? Why he in de bath all morning?’
Two orders this morning: one £4, the other £94. Typically, we couldn’t find the £94 order.
When Granny and I got back from lunch, Flo passed on a message to call someone called Jane in Castle Douglas, but I couldn’t work out from her writing whether the number ended in a 4 or a 9, so dialled both. Both were wrong numbers. This is the fourth time that she’s taken a message and managed to write down the number incorrectly. I just hope it wasn’t anything too important.
Nicky kept the shop open for twenty extra minutes because a man was browsing. He came to the counter with a pile of books, total price £47, and demanded them for £40. He left empty-handed when Nicky decided that £42 was as low as she could go. Once the door had closed behind him with a dull thud, Granny announced ‘We need-a again’. After much repetition and head-scratching, it transpired that she was saying ‘we need a gun’ – presumably for such customers.
Till Total £292.99
39 Customers
SATURDAY, 15 AUGUST
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Eliot was in the bath from 8.30 to 9 a.m. again.
Nicky was in today, and it was another beautiful day, so I went for lunch in the Isle of Whithorn again, this time with Anna. On the drive home she told me – with considerable sadness – that she’s moving back to America at the end of the month. I wonder whether, even though we have established a very strong friendship, it might not be enough for her to want to stay in Wigtown now that the relationship is truly over.
Christian, a Festival Company trustee, dropped off some books that he had repaired for me, including a first edition of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens which came from Samye Ling. On his retirement from the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, he decided to take up bookbinding to keep busy. He’s extremely good at it, and very reasonable on price, which means that when I’m buying, I can afford to buy valuable books in poor condition, factor in the repair cost and still leave a margin for profit.
Nicky’s Facebook update for the shop:
Nicky here! Oh it is indeed, great to be back!
So far it’s a tie for Today’s Prize Customer.
1 – ‘That’s £2.50 please’ … ‘Can i pay in American dollars?’
2 – ‘Could you hide that behind the counter’, (which often happens when customers want to buy a book as a surprise) … ‘my son wants it but i don’t want to buy it for him.
You decide! Mind you there’s 4 hours still to go …
Callum and Sigrid came for supper. Sigrid is Callum’s new girlfriend (he and Petra having separated), a Dutch woman who he met on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.
Till Total £197
15 Customers
MONDAY, 17 AUGUST
Online orders: 1 Orders found: 1
I’ve dug out the blackboard from the cellar and instructed Flo to write something amusing and witty on it and put it on the pavement in front of the shop. Her effort for today is:
FAQs
1 ‘Can I take a picture of the Kindle?’
Of course.
2 ‘Are all your books catalogued?’
No, we’re too lazy.
3 ‘Can we bring our dog in?’
Yes, but only if we can pet it.
4 ‘What’s that smell?’
…
5 ‘Do you have any children’s books?’
Yes, they’re next to that sign that says ‘Children’s Books’.
6 ‘Is Shaun here?’
Definitely not/probably not/he’s hiding.
Till Total £195.45
15 Customers
TUESDAY, 18 AUGUST
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
It was a beautiful sunny day. Anna climbed the Merrick, the highest hill in the south-west (843m), with two friends. Anna’s love of Galloway is infectious, and she’s probably done more singlehandedly than VisitScotland to encourage tourists to come here in the years that she’s lived here. Her book alone noticeably increased footfall in the shop.
Flo was in, and I had to look at books in a house in Gelston (about 40 miles east of Wigtown). I took Granny so that she could see what the buying side of the business is like. It was another small bungalow: this time an elderly couple who were moving somewhere even smaller, nearer Dumfries, so that they could be closer to the region’s main hospital as they became older. We took five boxes of pretty average stock and paid them £130. Granny was in her element, in the company of people who were roughly the same age as she feels inside, and spent the entire time comparing ailments and fragility with them. By the end of the conversation they must have felt that they were in relatively rude health when compared with her.
I asked Granny to do the blackboard messages today, which resulted in this rather bizarre message:
PLEASE, DON’T EAT THE BOOKS. (WE LOVE THE COVERS)
At 1 p.m. a huge stone fell from the chimney stack on one of the gables that I share with my neighbour and crashed through their roof, so I telephoned a local builder and left a message. Mercifully nobody was killed, or even hurt. It must have weighed a quarter of a ton.
Ken Barlow, an occasional customer and partially successful autobiographer, brought in two boxes of fishing books. I told him that I’d get back to him this week.
Till Total £369.49
35 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Granny appeared at breakfast time looking for a plaster for a cut on her face. Anna had popped round to pick up her mail, and was in the kitchen when Granny appeared. She found one and gave it to her, assuming that she’d squeezed a spot or something. She told Anna that she’d cut herself shaving. The horror must have been clearly visible on Anna’s face, as she continued to tell her that in Italy it is common for women to shave. God bless national stereotypes when they turn
out to be correct. She told Anna that the cut had happened when she ‘was put in order the face’.
Went for a boozy lunch with Carol-Ann and Anna at The Open Book which Anna is running this week. They’d decided to crack open a bottle of cava at noon and get some snacks from the co-op.
No reply from the builder about the chimney, so I phoned another builder and left a message on his voicemail. I’m keen to get someone to have a look at it before further loose mortar breaks free and does further, potentially fatal, damage.
Till Total £529.52
45 Customers
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Flo and Granny were in the shop, Granny still sporting the plaster on her chin.
Flo’s contribution to the blackboard today was a chalk sketch of a scruffy man in shorts (clearly me) with a speech bubble that said, ‘Write something that Facebook will like’.
An old woman came in with five boxes of sci-fi paperbacks. She didn’t strike me as a sci-fi reader, so I asked whose they were. I regretted it immediately when she told me that they’d belonged to her son, who had committed suicide ten years ago. Only now did she feel as though she could finally bear to part with them. I apologised for having asked, and gave her £100 for them.
Ashley arrived at 11 a.m. and managed to get the boiler working again.
In the afternoon I drove to a house in Carronbridge (about 40 miles away) to buy books. Two extremely well-spoken women (‘We’re in Debrett’s, you know’) were clearing their late parents’ house, a large Victorian villa in gorgeous grounds. Very good shooting and fishing collection, including some by BB (always sellable), some Thorburn illustrated books and one by Malloch, the master of salmon fishing in the early twentieth century, as well as some other interesting Victorian material. They seemed happy with my offer of £750 for five boxes.
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 19