Online orders: 2
Orders found: 0
Nicky was in today. When I opened the front door of the shop this morning, she was standing in the doorway brushing her teeth. Apparently she’d started brushing them in her van, assuming that she’d get to the bathroom in time to finish the job, then realised that I’d left my key in the door, so she couldn’t get in. She’d been there for quite a while before I appeared.
Ben and Beth came round at eleven o’clock to say goodbye. They’d taken a holiday cottage in Ardwell (near Stranraer) to recover from the festival and appeared to have had a great time. While we were chatting in the kitchen over a cup of tea, Yvonne from the festival office came in to ask me about renting the bothy. Once Ben and Beth had left, she spent half an hour talking about her job, but I honestly have no idea what she was trying to say. She kept repeating herself and saying things like ‘What I’m trying to say, I suppose is, well, you know, I’m not sure.’ She doesn’t seem particularly happy in Wigtown.
Till Total £330.60
17 Customers
SATURDAY, 10 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Nicky opened the shop today. Now that everyone’s gone and the festival is behind us, the town seems deathly quiet once again. This time of year is not my favourite.
As I was putting the trestle tables back in the cellar, Nicky reminded me of the year I’d bought a huge elm table on eBay. A few years ago I’d decided that the Writers’ Retreat needed something more elegant than the plastic trestles, and found a ten-foot-long Edwardian table for £100, which seemed like a bargain. At the start of the festival I was telling Philip Ardagh, one of the visiting speakers, all about it in the Retreat, and smugly boasting that it had only cost me £100. Unfortunately, he was the guest speaker at the Festival Dinner, and – right in the middle of the meal – the table collapsed. I was summoned from the pop-up wine bar by Laurie to repair it, and as I was screwing it back together, Philip sat on the sofa with his arms folded, smugly quoting me from our earlier conversation: ‘£100 on eBay. Bargain.’
Till Total £239.80
20 Customers
MONDAY, 12 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
The swallows have set out on their migration to Africa for the winter.
Over supper Granny and I had a chat about her life. She told me that she’d hated school in Genoa because, with her thick glasses and intellect, she was quite introverted and didn’t have many friends, so she was badly bullied and took refuge in books. When she went to university in Turin, she expected more of the same, but was surprised to discover that – rather than being victimised for her differences – she was fêted for them, and had a large and loyal circle of friends. We’ve agreed that she’s going back to Italy next week. She was visibly upset at the prospect, but she can’t stay here indefinitely, and I can’t afford to pay her. She fitted in fine in Wigtown, probably because of the same eccentricities that worked against her at school. Everyone – from the butcher to the retired women who work in the charity shop – knows her, and her experience of the town is that ‘Everyone are so kind’.
Till Total £170.45
16 Customers
TUESDAY, 13 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Granny opened the shop; I slept in until 10 a.m. My post-festival recovery time gets longer every year. When I appeared downstairs, Granny told me that my ‘snorking was very a-loud. I fink the loudest ever, like a fat pig.’
Sunny day. We’ve gone nearly a month with barely a drop of rain.
I came downstairs to find Granny in the doorway of the shop. She chain-smoked three cigarettes in a row – ‘Oh, there are no points in smoking less than three at one time’.
Back exercises in the evening with Granny and the usual G&T. I’m having to make them stronger and stronger, following her repeated complaints. They’ve now reached a 50:50 mix.
In today’s news, Waterstones announced that they’re no longer going to be selling Amazon Kindles in their shops. ‘Douglas McCabe, analyst for Enders, said it was “no surprise” Waterstones was removing Kindle device sales from its shops. “The e-reader may turn out to be one of the shortest-lived consumer technology categories,” he said.’ I hope he’s right.
Till Total £172.94
13 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 14 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Two customers brought books to the shop, loose in the boots of their cars, all rubbish, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon.
A customer came in at 2 p.m. and asked what had happened to the free coffees we used to have in the shop. I got rid of the coffee machine six years ago. When I bought the shop, John – the previous owner – had a filter coffee machine with a hot-plate from which customers could pour themselves free coffee. I continued with it for a few years until, tired of cleaning the machine every day, paying for decent ground coffee and Shearings coach trip visitors, who would devour it and complain if we ran out of milk, I eventually got rid of it. Not many people even noticed, and I felt guilty offering free coffee when other businesses in the town depend on selling tea and coffee for their livelihood.
Till Total £223.50
24 Customers
THURSDAY, 15 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 0
Granny opened the shop again.
Jane, who works in the festival office, brought in the two volumes of the Christie’s catalogue for the sale of the contents of Dumfries House. I offered her £75 for them. She told me that they belong to her mother, and she’ll have to check with her.
The shop seems much busier than it usually is at this time of year, but that might be partly explained by the fact that it’s a two-week school holiday in Scotland. This long break – longer than the English schools – was known as the ‘Tattie Holiday’ when I was a child, and was originally not really a holiday at all, but traditionally the time of the potato harvest when, pre-mechanisation, the potatoes were picked by hand, and everyone, including children, was co-opted into working the fields. It is now – in a triumph of pedestrian municipal nomenclature – just known as the ‘October holiday’.
Till Total £281.99
22 Customers
FRIDAY, 16 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Nicky’s Foodie Friday treat was an assortment of squashed Indian food. These seem to be her particular favourites when she’s scavenging. There was, as usual, nothing appetising about it, other than the fact that she hadn’t licked bits of it on the way in.
In the afternoon I drove to Dumfries with Granny to look at a book collection in a bungalow in a residential part of town. Granny had been complaining that she hadn’t been on enough buying trips, and wanted to come along, so I left the shop in Nicky’s hands and we headed off after lunch.
I’d bought books from this house before, and the man selling them was very friendly: he kindly brought us a cup of tea each and a tray of biscuits. The books were mainly about golf, and pretty run-of-the-mill, but I gave him £50 for two boxes. I dropped Granny off at the station and she took the bus back to Wigtown while I drove on to Edinburgh to stay with my sister Lulu for a wedding tomorrow.
Till Total £131
11 Customers
SATURDAY, 17 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Spent the day in Edinburgh.
Till Total £160.49
19 Customers
MONDAY, 19 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Arrived home from Edinburgh at 6 p.m. last night to find that Granny had spent yesterday tidying up the front of the shop. It hasn’t looked so organised for years – in fact, probably since Nicky started working in the shop. Perhaps I’ve found a balance: Nicky can spend her time messing the pl
ace up, and Granny can spend hers tidying up after Nicky, neatly satisfying both of their compulsions.
Today’s order was for the Dumfries House Christie’s catalogues, which Nicky – unaware that I’m still waiting to hear whether Jane’s mother has accepted my offer – listed online for £45 on Saturday. I emailed and explained the situation to the purchaser, and they were very understanding.
Till Total £136.48
12 Customers
TUESDAY, 20 OCTOBER
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
At 2 p.m. Donna, the wife of the late GP who was our family doctor for many years, popped into the shop to tell me that I had arranged to be at her house at 1.30 p.m. to look at his books. I’d completely forgotten, so I apologised, jumped in the van and drove round there. The collection consisted mainly of railway books, always a good selling subject in the shop, so I gave her £150 for them.
Granny spent the day packing up the books for this month’s mail-out.
Till Total £84.48
9 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 21 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 0
On her way down to open the shop Granny discovered a bat in the archaeology section. It was hanging from a book called Digging for History. I posted a photograph of it on Facebook, and Sheena, a friend who lives locally, messaged me and told me to put it in a shoe box, and that she’d come around later to collect it. I did as instructed, but failed to spot a tiny hole in the box, through which the bat escaped and flew up into the cornice in the drawing room. I thought it best just to leave it there until Sheena arrived.
Jeff the minister called in at ten o’clock looking slightly tired. His bike was parked outside the shop. He asked Granny if we had had any new theology books in. She looked blankly back at him, and a conversation ensued in which neither of them clearly had the slightest idea what the other was saying. It reminded me of the first month of Granny living here.
A woman from Castle Douglas came in with four boxes of books, mainly autobiographies, but there was a nicely illustrated copy of the Arabian Nights. Gave her £60. Shortly afterwards, a couple from Kirkcudbright brought in a collection of books, largely about the Loch Ness monster. She was quite overbearing and insisted on telling me where she’d bought each one of the books, along with a string of tedious anecdotes as I was going through them. Eventually I suggested that they go for a walk while I checked the values of the books I wasn’t familiar with. Thankfully, they did. There was some interesting material among them, and on their return from their walk I offered her £130 for about twenty books, which she seemed quite happy with.
Sheena came around in the evening and extracted the bat from the cornice and took it home.
Stayed up late chatting to Granny. Today was her last day in the shop. Tomorrow I will drive her to the airport. She’s been a fantastic help, and I’m sad to lose her, but staying here indefinitely isn’t good for her, and I would appreciate my privacy back. As she was packing, I asked her if she’d remembered her passport, to which she replied ‘Passport? I never owned a passport.’ Further investigation revealed that her travelling – and she is well travelled – has all been within the EU, and just using her Italian ID card. Being born in 1970, I can barely comprehend that international travel is possible without a passport.
Bed at 2 a.m.
Till Total £131.99
14 Customers
THURSDAY, 22 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 0
Awoke to discover that Captain had taken up residence in my laundry basket, from which his head was poking out.
Nicky was in today, so I asked her to go through the Loch Ness collection that I bought yesterday and list anything valuable online.
Drove to Edinburgh with Sally (the woman who’s been running The Open Book for the past ten days) and Granny. As I said goodbye to a tearful Granny at the airport, she handed me a book as a leaving present. It was a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The gaps in my knowledge of literature are vast and plentiful, but Russian literature is something of a chasm.
Home at 6.30 p.m.
Till Total £96.50
11 Customers
FRIDAY, 23 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Nicky arrived twenty minutes late: ‘Sorry I’m late, a tractor clipped my wing mirror near my house and it took me twenty minutes to catch up with it.’ It comes as no surprise that it took her twenty minutes to catch up with a tractor: she drives like a myopic nonogenarian.
One of the orders was for one of the Loch Ness Monster books that Nicky listed yesterday. It sold for £70.
Till Total £173
8 Customers
SATURDAY, 24 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
As I was tidying up the paperback fiction section and feeling fairly illiterate from looking at titles I hadn’t read but felt I ought to have done, I started instead to notice the books that I had read: The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks; several books by Gerald Durrell and Ian Fleming; High Fidelity by Nick Hornby; A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving; The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson; Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez; and others that I’d completely forgotten I had read.
There has been a brown trilby on the sofa in the big room since the festival. I assume that it is Nicky’s Tyrolean yodelling hat, but keep forgetting to ask her about it.
Till Total £143.50
14 Customers
MONDAY, 26 OCTOBER
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 4
Surprise visit this morning from Daisy, the Daily Telegraph journalist who covered the festival two years ago, when they were our media sponsor. She brought her family along: they’re here on holiday near Portpatrick. She’s now working as a theatre critic.
A small child ducked under the barrier at the top of the stairs that lead up from the shop and used the toilet – I spotted him trying to sneak out unnoticed when I was coming out of the kitchen after I’d made a cup of tea. He slid under the barrier and ran off. I’ve no idea how he knew where it was.
Another small child found an unpriced book and told his sister that this is how we ‘trap people into buying things’, so that they have to come to the counter and ask us what the price is. A man, who I assume was the children’s father, asked ‘Is it called The Bookshop because it’s full of books?’ How do these people feed themselves?
Sheena called to say that the bat was fine, and has been released back into the wild, probably to be devoured by Captain.
Till Total £333.99
30 Customers
TUESDAY, 27 OCTOBER
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 2
Callum in again. Managed to lose my glasses and spent most of the day feeling utterly helpless.
Till Total £247.99
22 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 28 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Telephone call this morning:
Caller: Eh, I’m calling from Scunthorpe in England. I’m looking for a book which has a story about my grandfather in it. He was a famous poacher.
Me: OK, well can you tell me what the book is called?
Caller: Eh? No, I don’t know what it’s called. I know what he was called, though.
Me: Right, so you want me to read every book in the shop until I spot his name in one of them?
Caller: Eh, that’s very kind of you.
An elderly woman and her daughter came in with three boxes of pretty average stock, but there was a mint copy of Wigtownshire Agriculturalists and Breeders among them. This is a very rare local book, and I have a buyer who snaps up every copy I can get hold of, so I gave her £65 for it.
Till Total £274.42
24 Customers
THURSDAY, 29 OCTOBER
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
I managed to get the ‘Death to the Kindle’ mug available for sale on Amazon. I wonder how long it will be before it is removed.
As I was pricing up books, I came across a copy of a book called A Treasury of Bookplates. Once, shortly after I’d bought the shop, I was looking at a photographer’s library in Montrose. When I came across a book about the manufacturing process for Leica lenses, the photographer peered over the top of his glasses at me and said, ‘Every industry has its porn.’ For me, this book about bookplates is bookseller filth. It has now been squirrelled away into my collection.
Carol-Ann is still living in the bothy. This morning she told me that because I’d locked the garden door she couldn’t get out to go to work yesterday morning and had to find a ladder, lean it against the wall, climb up and jump over.
Till Total £181.38
24 Customers
FRIDAY, 30 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Nicky was in today. Thankfully she didn’t bring any gastronomic treats from the Morrisons skip.
A woman and her mother came to the shop because they had read Anna’s book and wanted to see the town for themselves.
In the evening, after I’d locked up, I picked up Lindsey, one of this year’s interns, from Barrhill railway station at 6.20 p.m. She’s back for the weekend to catch up with people. Came back and met up with Margi (Open Book resident) in the pub, where she was were happily chatting to Colin from the sawmill and a few other regulars. I spotted Callum and some friends sitting around a table, so we wandered over and sat down with them.
Till Total £168.49
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 25