Home at 4 p.m. to find that Nicky – contrary to instructions – had started raking her way through the fertiliser sacks and not bothered with the boxes.
I listed the signed Bertrand Russell book on eBay after work, and read a bit more of The Living Mountain. It’s a truly beautiful book; Nan Shepherd’s powers of description are pure poetry, and her passion – obsession even – for the Cairngorms is plainly evident. Her description of the texture of light describes Galloway exactly: ‘Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity.’
Till Total £212.40
19 Customers
MONDAY, 30 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
It was a wet morning, and cold, but it brightened up around lunchtime. This seems to have been the pattern for much of November.
At 10 a.m. a man with an enormous beard came in, dripping all over the floor, and said, ‘I’m from Devon, I’m working up here for a month. The woman who lives next door to me has written a children’s book. She published it herself. It’s not very good. Would you like to stock it?’
Later on, a customer accosted me as I was tidying up the topography section and said, ‘I was here six months ago and you had a book on RAF bases. Do you still have it?’ We have around 600 books in the aviation section. He then dropped a book while standing on the top of the stepladder, said ‘Oops’, then just left it on the ground. He found the book he wanted, which was £28.50, and demanded a discount, then, as the credit card machine was processing his payment he said, ‘Well, you obviously won’t have fibre optic in a backwater like this.’ We’ve had superfast broadband for six months.
We have several stepladders throughout the shop, and customers usually help themselves when they need them, occasionally asking if it is OK. Once, when I was clearing books from a house near Kirkcudbright (about 30 miles away), I spotted a set of very small spiral library steps. I asked the woman whose books I was buying if it was for children (thinking that I might ask if I could buy it for the children’s section of the shop), to which she replied that it had been custom-made for Jimmy Clitheroe, the diminutive star of radio and television during the 1960s. She and her husband had helped clear the contents of his mother’s house after they had both died (he had lived with her, and he died of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills on the day of her funeral). Apparently, they found hundreds of empty whisky bottles in the loft when they were clearing it out. I bought Jimmy Clitheroe’s library steps from her for £20.
Till Total £88.50
5 Customers
DECEMBER
A well-known Edinburgh residenter sent round a crate of books to sell a month or two ago. He had been clearing out part of his library. We were glad to buy, and offered a good price. He rang up on the phone a few days later to acknowledge the cheque. ‘I make only one stipulation,’ he said. ‘Every one of those books has my personal bookplate. I want them all steamed off before you offer them for sale.’ There were between eighty and ninety volumes.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ replied Mr Pumpherston. ‘We are not a public laundry.’
‘Then you can scrape them off with a sharp instrument,’ said the man.
‘Nor a barber’s shop either,’ added Mr Pumpherston. ‘You should have thought of that, sir, before you plaistered on the bookplates.’
Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller
Bookplates are one of the many reasons that the second-hand book trade is endlessly fascinating. They are usually unique to the book owner, but there are the generic things that you can buy in card shops and the like, which have a picture of Garfield or Snoopy and just say ‘Ex Libris’ and leave a blank space for you to fill in your name before you peel off the adhesive tape and stick it on the endpaper, immediately reducing the value of the book. Custom-made bookplates, though, are a different matter altogether. Generally these would have been commissioned by the wealthy or the aristocracy, and more often than not they are heraldic, and come from country house libraries. Occasionally, though, book lovers commission something different, and you can sometimes recognise the hand of a well-known artist. I had one by Jessie M. King a few years ago. It was in a copy of Thorburn’s British Birds, and had been custom-made for the owner of the library. It was a beautiful thing, and worth considerably more than the book. In aristocratic libraries, or where the owner has a coat of arms, this is usually what the bookplate shows, more often than not from a copperplate engraving, with the name of the current incumbent of whatever title it may be. The purpose of bookplates, rather like writing your name on the endpaper, was originally to ensure the book’s return to its rightful owner when lent out, but they have become objets d’art in their own right.
Bookplates don’t generally devalue books and frequently add value, depending on the owner or the artist involved. Removing them, however, does significantly devalue the book. Even a well-executed book plate’s removal will leave some damage. It used to happen that customers bringing in books to sell would have removed the front free endpaper in the mistaken belief that their name, written on the page, would devalue the book more than ripping the page out. Someone’s name in ink on a blank page does very little, if anything, to reduce the value of a book, and, like endpapers, depending whose name it is, it can significantly increase the book’s value. There are numerous books about bookplates, and even a Bookplate Society. Perhaps my favourite was from a collection I bought from the daughter of a man called Robin Hodge in Glasgow. It pictured a caveman wielding a club, and underneath were the words ‘Gonna geezit back, eh?’, perfectly encapsulating the original purpose of the bookplate.
TUESDAY, 1 DECEMBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Driving rain all day.
Hamish, a retired actor and regular customer who lives in nearby Bladnoch, came in this morning, presumably waiting for his prescription from the chemist, three doors up. He bought a book about Lancaster bombers. He has a keen interest in military history.
Another telephone call from the Pensions Regulator.
Pensions Regulator: Hello, is that Shaun Bythell?
Me: Yes.
Pensions Regulator: And your business address is 17 North Main Street, Wigtown?
Me: Yes.
Pensions Regulator: It’s Anne from the Pensions Regulator here. We need to go through your declaration of compliance.
Me: Really? Do we have to do it now? When is it due?
Pensions Regulator: Seven months ago, so yes, we have to do it now.
Me: OK. What do you need to know?
Pensions Regulator: Firstly, your name.
Me: You’ve just called me by my name. You know what it is. You even pronounced it correctly.
Pensions Regulator: Yes, but you need to tell me what it is.
Me: Shaun Bythell.
Pensions Regulator: And your business name and address?
Me: You already know that too. You’ve just asked me if my business is at 17 North Main Street, Wigtown.
When the interminable conversation finally reached its conclusion, a customer came to the counter, holding a book open at the first page, on which were two different prices: ‘I don’t actually want to buy this book, but it has two prices in it. Which one is the correct price?’
At 3 p.m. there was a delivery of four boxes of books from Samye Ling.
Sandy the tattooed pagan turned up with his friend Lizzy. The last time he was here he bought her a copy of The Hereditary Sheriffs of Galloway for her Christmas present. Today she sneaked up to the counter and asked me if I could make a voucher for him for credit in the shop as his Christmas present. This will probably be the only Christmas trade I get this year.
I took thirty-seven boxes of rejected stock over to The Open Book after I’d closed the shop. I was going to take them to the recycling, but Finn asked me if they could have them.
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br /> Till Total £40.55
7 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 2 DECEMBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
One of today’s orders was for a book in the theology section, but I couldn’t get to it because of the agricultural feed bags from the Dalswinton deal.
The first customer of the day bought a £60 book on the history of driving horses.
Isabel was in to do the accounts all afternoon. A wild-looking man with a huge beard brought in a box of books as a donation. Among them were The Book of Grass, an Anthology of Indian Hemp, LSD, The Problem-Solving Psychedelic and Drugs of Hallucination.
Reading The Living Mountain after work, I came across a passage that neatly summarises an element of the personality of the native Gallovidian:
I remembered an old shepherd in Galloway, whom I had asked which spur of the hill I should take to go up Merrick. When he had told me, he looked at me and said, ‘You’ve not been up before? Do you know what you’re undertaking?’ ‘I’ve not been up before, but I’ve been all over the Cairngorms.’ ‘The Cairngorms, have you?’ His gesture dismissed me.
This is a perfect example of the capacity of the people who live in this area to bring you crashing back down to earth if they suspect that you’re getting above yourself. In many ways it’s grounding and prevents one’s ego from becoming too inflated, but equally I’ve seen it used to belittle people’s genuine achievements.
Perhaps Nan Shepherd’s desire to climb what is now prefixed with a definite article as ‘The’ Merrick – the highest of the hills in the south of Scotland – is because it shares with her beloved Cairngorms a granite rock base. The hard, igneous mineralogy that forms the Galloway Hills – once sharp edges, rounded by the unrelenting power of the retreating glaciers of the Ice Age – are not too dissimilar to the rugged mountains of her familiar Deeside range, and their familiarity may well have appealed to her more than the sharp lunar landscape of the Lewisian gneiss of the northwest of Scotland, so iconic in the popular perception of Scotland: Suilven, Torridon, Assynt – those exceptional, stunning, dramatic hills that form so small a part of the country, but which appear to have captured the imagination of those who have visited them so overwhelmingly that they have become the chocolate-box images of how the entire country is perceived. The flora and fauna of the Galloway Hills would have been more home to Nan Shepherd than the spiky inverted canines of the craggy Atlantic top-left quadrant of Scotland.
Once, when Callum and I were climbing in the Cairngorms, we took a route up Fiacaill Ridge in the depths of winter with a group of his friends. I genuinely thought I was going to die that day, as we picked our way up the icy, exposed face towards the summit, tethered together in what seemed like a suicide pact, but, put in the situation of ‘returning were more tedious than go o’er’, we found our way to the top in spite of the terrifying drop to certain death if we failed, and after the ice climb I found a part of myself that I had not known before.
Till Total £179.49
7 Customers
THURSDAY, 3 DECEMBER
Online orders: 5
Orders found: 5
Among today’s orders I found A Pictorial History of Dumfries and Galloway Fire Brigade. It was in the natural history section, and Nicky had listed it and put it there. As always, there will be an irrational explanation, although I’m not sure when I’ll see her again. She has twenty-two weeks off – we agreed to compromise on this year’s holiday entitlement and one year backdated – and she’s said she plans to take them all back to back.
Wacek appeared at 9 a.m. with his builders and they set to work on scaffolding the chimney.
At about 4 p.m., as darkness was falling, a customer asked, ‘Where did you get your lights from? They’re really good.’
Me: Which lights do you mean?
Customer: The emotionally sensitive ones out the back. They come on really quickly.
I’m not sure if incredulity can be considered an emotion, but if it can, those lights should be blazing right now.
Skyped Granny. She talked for over an hour, barely letting me get a word in edgeways, and complaining that I never message her. She’s clearly missing Scotland and threatening to come back.
Till Total £15
2 Customers
FRIDAY, 4 DECEMBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Norrie in.
As we were sorting through the endless boxes of books, I found a book called The English Tourist in Italy, which contains the following extremely useful phrases:
Your niece has very beautiful arms, how old is she?
Whose trunks are these?
You have eaten too many oranges.
You have a cat which is very ugly.
Mrs Folli is a beautiful woman, but her daughter is very ugly.
You are as studious as my son, but you are not so intelligent as he is.
I am angry with you.
I left the shop at eleven o’clock and drove to a house near Hawick (three hours away) whose owners wished to sell some of their books. It was a beautiful Georgian stately home, and from its appearance I was expecting an antiquarian library, but it was largely modern books, and not particularly interesting, but just about enough to make the trip worthwhile. I wrote the (relatively young) couple a cheque for £310. They were moving house and wanted to divest themselves of all the books that they hadn’t already packed up, so I ended up taking all the books I didn’t want, as well as those I did.
As I handed the cheque over, the man said, ‘This must be the most profitable day of the year for you.’ I assume that he was implying that I had just ripped them off – a bit much, considering they’d just sold their house, which, I imagine, must be worth over £1m.
Till Total £2.50 1 Customer
SATURDAY, 5 DECEMBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
Wild and wet again today.
No internet connection when I opened the shop this morning, so I spent the first hour and a half working out how to repair it.
In our Amazon inbox this morning (when I eventually worked out how to get us back online) was a lengthy inquiry into the condition of a book, The Paradox Men, which is priced at 60p. Ian, my book dealer friend from Grimsby, is right. Years ago he predicted that with the relentless rise of Amazon and their prioritisation of customers at the expense of sellers, the day would come when people expect fine copies of books for almost nothing. This would have been a £10 book ten years ago.
Bum-Bag Dave came in at lunchtime. I made the mistake of letting him engage me in conversation. He rambled on endlessly about South America and how beautiful the women there are. He bought two books and managed to cover the counter with various revolting-looking things, including several tissues and a few crumpled receipts as he dug through his principal bum-bag in search of his wallet.
Till Total £159.55
8 Customers
MONDAY, 7 DECEMBER
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 1
Callum in at 10.30.
Very quiet day. Nicky and her friend Morag turned up to taunt me at about two o’clock. They’re off metal-detecting tomorrow and wanted to borrow Anna’s metal-detector, which is in the cellar.
I found a Victorian photograph album among some boxes of books, complete with photographs. Normally, when I come across these, the photographs have been removed, but these were mostly studio portraits, which may add a little to the value of the album.
At three o’clock Wacek appeared and told me that he’d finished repairing my neighbour’s roof, and had fixed the chimney. When I asked him how they’d got the huge lump of granite up there, he told me that they’d cut it into three bits and lifted them and mortared them back in. It’s a huge relief that it’s fixed before the rest of the winter rains and frosts can cause further damage.
Till Total £161.99
7 Customers
TUESDAY, 8 DECEMBER<
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Online orders: 5
Orders found: 4
Calm, sunny day after what feels like weeks of storms.
All today’s orders were from Amazon. I suspect that we may have been suspended from Abe again.
A man from the RSPB called Chris came to tell me about a book that he’s producing. He was here for three hours. The book sounded quite interesting: it’s a naturalist’s notes on birds he’d seen in Wigtownshire between 1890 and 1935. The original naturalist was Jack McHaffie Gordon, whose grandfather owned (in the 1830s) the building that is now the shop.
My father dropped in after having his hair cut, and we discussed next year’s fishing plans again.
After lunch I unloaded the boxes of books from the Hawick deal. Later, as I was thumbing through The English Tourist in Italy again I came across some even more useful phrases:
I have never known so avaricious a man as you.
Your ill-bred friends gathered all the ripe peaches in my garden, and took them away.
I cannot eat this bread, it is too stale.
You are a rude and selfish man, and this is the reason why they cannot endure you.
That Scotchman is very young.
Our King is better than your President.
Only one customer through the door all day.
Wacek and the boys finished taking down the scaffolding and headed off to their next job.
Till Total £25 1 Customer
WEDNESDAY, 9 DECEMBER
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
As I was looking for the orders this morning, one of which was for William Maxwell to Robert Burns (located in the Scottish poetry section), I spotted copies of Milton and Shelley’s works in among the Scottish poetry. I sense the hand of Nicky, from whom, coincidentally, there was an email this morning: ‘Here are a couple of helpful “festive” shots – hope you appreciate the robin! We did it especially for you – the robin was lying in the playpark where we went metal-detecting and found £6.76! Cool eh!’ The ‘festive’ shots she was referring to consisted of photographs of a pile of empty bottles, on top of which was perched the stiffened corpse of a dead robin which she and Morag had clearly found when they were out yesterday.
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 28