Confessions of a Bookseller

by Shaun Bythell

  Till Total £436.14

  45 Customers

  SUNDAY, 30 AUGUST

  Online orders:

  Orders found:

  Awoke at about 2 p.m. feeling considerably better than I had expected. Anna and I wandered about Edinburgh, saw a few fringe street performances and had a very late lunch in the Grassmarket. We got back to Lulu’s at about 7 p.m.

  MONDAY, 31 AUGUST

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 1

  Flo opened the shop, and I drove Anna from Edinburgh to Glasgow airport to catch a flight to Dublin, and then on to Boston. We had breakfast together in the airport at 8.45 a.m., during which my appetite was considerably suppressed by the sight of the man at the next table – a short, fat man who insisted on sitting with his tightly nylon-trouser-clad legs wide open facing me so that I was exposed to the vision of his belly/genitals wobbling with anticipation as he spooned his full Scottish breakfast into the gaping maw below his walrus moustache.

  It was a very tearful farewell for both of us. Before she went through the interminable maze of security checks, I gave her a letter that I had written on Friday in which (I hope) I managed to articulate my feeble apologies for being unable to commit to a relationship, and my appreciation of her as the most giving, kind and wonderful person it has ever been my good fortune to have met.

  I drove back on the Nick of the Balloch road – a 20-mile single-track hill road – only to get to Glentrool to discover that the road had been closed for resurfacing, and that I had to turn back and drive all the way back to Maybole and come back on another road.

  Till Total £156

  12 Customers

  SEPTEMBER

  Some customers are talkative: some are dour and silent. It is the talkers I guard against. They will hold you with a glittering eye for half an hour, sometimes longer, and care nothing that three other folk are waiting to be served. After a little practice, it is easy to spot these garrulous bodies. They come in with an expectant smirk, full of bonhomie, smacking their lips for a fine long crack. With this kind I always stick to business. At the first responsive snicker, or even nod, my button-hole is gripped between firm finger and thumb. They are friendly bodies, these talkers. They are the kind that used to throng bookshops in the old days when such places were a howff for book-lovers.

  Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller

  Baxter is remarkably accurate in his descriptions of customer behaviour. The talkative types he introduces here still haunt bookshops today, and I doubt whether any other business receives the benefit of their wisdom in such prolixity. It’s hard to say why we who work in bookshops are the victims of these people. In some circumstances it would be interesting to hear someone talking about nuclear reactors for forty-five minutes, but those circumstances are not when you’re at work, and you’re looking around you at boxes of books that need to be emptied, the books priced and put on the shelves, or piles of books that need to be listed online, or other customers who require assistance. We have a few of these, though not too many, but there is one in particular who causes my heart to sink whenever he appears in the shop. In the interests of diplomacy I ought not to reveal too much about his identity as he lives locally, but I have spent many a long hour trapped behind the counter, listening to his thoughts about Scottish independence (against), gay marriage (against), immigration (against) and large multinationals (very much in favour), as well as a host of other subjects. On one occasion he bought a book for £2.50. I think in future I’m going to charge him by the minute for the amount of my time he wastes during the working day.

  Baxter’s tactic of remaining stoutly indifferent to this type of person is occasionally effective, but infrequently. More often than not they are not looking for a discussion, or an argument, the affair is entirely a soliloquy and your attention is only required to make the occasion look less self-indulgent to any unfortunate onlookers. There’s very little that can be done to stop them, although recently I’ve taken to discreetly dialling the shop landline from my mobile phone and answering it, pretending to be dealing with a customer return or some such thing to break the monotony. It almost inevitably continues the moment I hang up on myself.

  Sandy the tattooed pagan is a master of conversation. He is always interesting, engaging and witty. I often find him in the shop in animated dialogue with complete strangers. His finest gift, though, is timing. He knows exactly how long to chat without being intrusive, which is why it is always a pleasure to see him.

  TUESDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 1

  Flo was in today. Her blackboard effort this morning:

  SPECIAL OFFFER – you give us money and we give you books!

  I made a deal with Flo that once she finishes work (Thursday) I’ll give her £5 for every blackboard idea she comes up with that gets more than twenty shares on Facebook, but she’s not allowed to get her friends to share them. Today’s one was shared forty-nine times in the first hour of posting on Facebook. Yesterday’s was shared sixty-five times.

  Granny reminded me that we’d agreed to do the back exercises that the physio had given me. We both decided that the whole experience would be considerably improved by a gin and tonic, so I prepared a fairly strong one for each of us. Granny asked me, shortly after she’d finished it, ‘Was there any gin in that? It taste like water.’ Shortly afterwards she disappeared upstairs to wash her legs.

  After work I painted the side access door into the garden. I’ve messaged Willie Wright, a local man who does odd jobs for me from time to time, to see if he can help me shift the remaining rubble tomorrow morning. Willie is a well-known figure about Wigtown. He spends a good deal of time walking up and down the street, looking as though he has something very important to attend to, and with an impressive sense of purpose, but generally he’s just going between the co-op and his house.

  Till Total £239.22

  23 Customers

  WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 1

  Flo in. Set her to work listing the sci-fi titles on FBA.

  Granny came down at 9.15 a.m. and did her mafia pointing thing at me, and said, ‘a-Shone, last night I go for a piss at 3 a.m. and I hearing a funny noise-a. I finking-a “What thees? An animal?” Then I realise that it is you snorking. It was very loud-a.’

  My father appeared at 11 a.m. to discuss fishing, and whether or not he’s going to take a rod on the River Luce next year. It will be a sad day, the day he gives up the Luce. He’s been fishing the river for over forty years.

  As has become the norm now, after work I did my back exercises with Granny. Tonight she wolfed down her G&T in seven seconds. She’s getting faster.

  Finished painting the side door to the garden after I’d closed the shop.

  Till Total £145.49

  10 Customers

  THURSDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 0

  Callum and Robert arrived at 9 a.m., Flo was slightly later, but as it was her last day there seemed little point in mentioning it. Not that it ever made the slightest difference when I mentioned it before.

  This morning I drove to Newton Stewart to collect two new pairs of glasses, fitted to my new prescription. One pair is a bit trendy, the other very similar to the pair I have worn for the past twenty years. I showed them to Granny, who told me that I look like a hipster in the trendy pair. They will never see the light of day again. While I was in Newton Stewart, I picked up paint for the door of the bothy and a lock for the side door. Claire in Home Hardware told me that her daughter had forced her to watch our rap video, ‘Readers’ Delight’. She was less than impressed.

  On my way home I picked up the laptop from my parents. I bought it for them two years ago, but now that they both have iPads they never use it, so I’m going to give it to Granny, since hers conked out when she spilled tea on it. Wore my new glasses
all afternoon and ended up with a dreadful headache and the feeling that I’d taken a huge dose of LSD.

  I attempted to hug Flo as she was leaving at the end of the day, and thank her for her (relatively) hard work, but she pushed me away.

  Granny and I did our back exercises at 6 p.m., as usual. As I prised myself from the floor, creaking and moaning, I complained that being in my forties was depressing. She replied, ‘No, Shaun, forty is the new thirteen.’ Tonight’s G&T lasted – I would guess – two seconds. It’s almost as though she’s in training for some sort of competition.

  Spent the evening painting in the bothy. Finished at 9 p.m.

  Till Total £125.50

  8 Customers

  FRIDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 0

  Nicky brought in oatcakes, cheese and pickle, all pillaged from the Morrisons skip. Granny ate them all before lunchtime.

  Dennis – a former employee of The Bookshop (before my time) and fellow fisherman who is always keen to pick up odd jobs whenever he can – arrived at 10 a.m., and we loaded the trailer with rubble from the bothy, then dumped it in Bob’s field. We loaded a second trailer and were going to take it to the dump, but Nicky started scavenging through it and asked if she could have all the off-cuts of timber, so instead we drove to Auchenmalg and dumped it in a pile outside her hovel. On the way home we dropped the trailer back at Callum’s.

  The garden is starting to look like it might be almost presentable by the time of the festival. During the drive to Nicky’s, Dennis regaled me with tall tales. He is well known in Wigtown for these, which inevitably end with an account of a fight in which the odds are stacked against him, and which he wins through a combination of cunning and brute strength. Today I heard the story of a friend of his who fell 170 feet and broke his back, but stood up, dusted himself off and went back to work, and of the year in which he lost twenty-seven teeth in an assortment of punch-ups, how he escaped from a police van after he was arrested and how he punched the headmaster of his primary school. Even before he lost his teeth, he was completely incomprehensible, but since he had the last few removed, he might as well be speaking Swahili.

  Granny came outside and said, ‘I sorry for distoorb you, but a-can I a-tidy up the railway room?’ It has become completely chaotic, so I happily agreed. By 3 p.m. she had cleaned and reorganised every shelf, and the place looked immaculate. At four she pointed out that, despite buying two new pairs of glasses, I had reverted to wearing my old pair. I honestly have no idea how that happened. I must have taken the wrong pair from the case when I went to bed.

  Till Total £357.29

  20 Customers

  SATURDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 1

  Nicky in. Sunny and warm, now that the wind is coming from the west again.

  Online sales seem to have dwindled from a small stream to a trickle.

  Dennis came in again, so I set him to digging the turf for the new path outside the bothy. At 11 a.m. I drove to Penkiln Sawmill to pick up some materials and order some timber and gravel so that the path will be ready before the festival. Also, the bag of sand outside the shop which has been there since we started work on the bothy is finally nearly empty. Every time I look at it I think of what Robbie Murphie said about it becoming part of the street furniture.

  Granny did the blackboard sign for the day. I realised that she’s been here for two months and has barely seen anywhere in the area, so I took the afternoon off to drive her to St Medan’s, an ancient church and graveyard (she’s obsessed with graveyards) and a beautiful sandy beach. ‘This beautiful, the water-a, it beautiful, not like the water-a in Italy.’

  Got back at 7 p.m. and did the back exercises with Granny (her G&T almost lasted a full minute before she’d hoofed it), then cooked supper, then went out to paint the bothy. Finished at 10.20.

  Till Total £249.45

  12 Customers

  MONDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER

  Online orders: 2

  Orders found: 2

  Granny opened the shop. Parents came for coffee at 11 a.m. and we discussed the possibility of them buying another property in the town and setting up a Writers’ Workshop residency. This, unsurprisingly, was Anna’s idea.

  I told Granny – in jest – that she couldn’t have a lunch break. She called me a ‘shitty fucking bastard’, then told me that I’d been ‘snorking’ again last night. We decided that it was probably a good idea to tidy up the science fiction section of the shop before the festival, so we set about that. I’d never really considered myself a fan of the genre but, sorting the books out, I was surprised by how many of them I’d read: all of Douglas Adams, most of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series, some Isaac Asimov, Terry Pratchett, John Wyndham, mostly read as a teenager.

  Dennis and Robert, the plumber, were in today. They both have the capacity to talk for hours on end, so neither of them achieved a great deal.

  Picked up £160 in pound coins and 50p pieces from the bank in readiness for the festival. Running out of change during the busiest week of the year is not what you want to happen.

  This morning’s post included, among the bills, a beautiful letter from Anna.

  Till Total £326.40

  17 Customers

  TUESDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER

  Online orders: 4

  Orders found: 4

  Granny began her stint at The Open Book today, meaning that I was on my own in the shop for the first time in months, so it was left to me to do the daily blackboard:

  You have just walked past a bookshop. Is there something wrong with you?

  Posted it on Facebook at 11 a.m. Much to my surprise, within a few minutes it had been shared twenty times. By the end of the day it had been shared over 1400 times, the record for anything ever posted on the shop’s Facebook page.

  Robert came in, and asked me if I could make a mount for the radiator for the bathroom in the bothy.

  Anne Barclay, festival manager, appeared around midday with the interns for this year’s festival, Beth and Lindsey. She asked if I could organise some books for them all to hold for a photo shoot on Thursday.

  Telephone call at lunchtime from Stuart Kelly to confirm that he’s staying here during the festival, and asking if there’s a spare room for a friend of his on the second weekend.

  The Penkiln Sawmill lorry arrived at 2 p.m. with materials for the new pellet shed and the gravel to finish the path through the garden. This all needs to be done before the festival, which is now just over a fortnight away.

  Till Total £256.95

  14 Customers

  WEDNESDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER

  Online orders: 3

  Orders found: 3

  I could hear the signature ‘clack clack clack’ of Granny’s hard-heeled boots as I came down to open the shop at 9 a.m. She’d opened up early, so I took over and she left for The Open Book.

  Stuart McLean returned to trawl his way through the remaining boxes of sci-fi. By the end of the day I’d had three emails from friends he’d contacted to tell them about the collection, and had sold £70 worth of them thanks to him.

  In today’s post was a letter from Mrs Phillips (‘I’m ninety-two and blind’ was how she began every phone call when she used to ring the shop, although by now she must be ninety-four and blind), simply addressed to ‘Shaun, The Bookshop, Wigtown’. Mrs Phillips is utterly wonderful. She constantly sends me requests for books that she thinks her great-grandchildren ought to read. Particularly endearing is her sign-off for her correspondence, which is simply ‘Phillips’.

  Customer in the shop at 5.10 p.m. (we close at 5 p.m.) asked Granny, ‘What time do you close?’

  Emanuela: We are closed. We close at 5 p.m.

  Customer: Oh.

  Ten minutes later I spotted him still there and told him that we were closed. A further ten minutes later he finally left without buying anything.

  With the colder weather appro
aching, I decided to cook a casserole for tomorrow. I told Granny that I would be away for most of the day and she’d be alone in the shop. (The Open Book is being covered by a volunteer.) She called me a ‘Fucking piece of shit-a.’ She seems to have overcome the timorousness that characterised her first few weeks.

  Till Total £203.48

  21 Customers

  THURSDAY, 10 SEPTEMBER

  Online orders: 1

  Orders found: 1

  Gorgeous, sunny day. Granny in. Only one order, so Abe has clearly yet to give us the OK to upload our database. I spent the first hour of the day showing Granny how to list books on FBA, and set her to work on the enormous pile of sci-fi boxes that Flo had made a start on. While I was explaining the process, she made several references to Flo, calling her ‘The Flo’.

  There was a letter from the builder in the post today; the estimate for the repair to the chimney is £7,500. I must email it to the insurance company a.s.a.p. It’s unlikely that I’ll get the repair done before the festival now, even if the insurance company decides to make a contribution towards it, which seems unlikely following the last telephone call with them about it.

  Left the shop at 11.30 and drove to Clydebank to look at a book collection. It had belonged to a man who died last year. His widow was selling his collection of books on the American Civil War. I arrived slightly late to find the widow, her daughter and her grandson all sitting in the tiny room in which the collection was shelved. I introduced myself, then started working my way through the books, making piles on the floor; all the while they sat there in silence, staring at me. This rarely happens, as people tend to leave you to go through their books unscrutinised while they continue with whatever business they generally conduct throughout the day. It’s quite disconcerting to know that six eyes are monitoring your every move. After I’d made a pile of about forty books, the daughter asked me to give them an idea of what they could expect me to offer for the books I’d already removed, so I told them that the paperbacks (all in mint condition) would be roughly £1 each – some more, some less, but that would be the average – and the hardbacks would range from £2 each to £20 each, depending on scarcity, condition, subject matter and demand. They seemed relieved, then the widow told me that another dealer had already been to look at the collection, and offered them 50p a book for the whole lot. Not wishing to make an enemy of the absent, unnamed dealer, I explained that the second-hand book trade is in turmoil, and that we all have different pricing strategies and buying rates. The widow replied that she had ‘told him to get out’ as soon as he’d made the offer. It was a fairly good collection, and the condition was near fine in almost every case, so I selected seven boxes’ worth and offered them £365. They accepted immediately, so I boxed them up, wrote her a cheque, then left. American Civil War books sell quite well in the shop, and it’s always good to acquire the collection of someone who knew exactly what they were buying when he put the library together.