Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

Bev dropped off a box of the mugs onto which she’s printed the cover of Gay Agony .

Till total £57

5 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

An Australian customer paid for a £1.50 book in small change but clearly had no idea what each coin was and took about five minutes to work it out. At one point he asked, ‘What do you use these 1p and 2p coins for?’

Anna telephoned at 3 p.m. and we reminisced about a famous instance of her linguistic impressionism: the time her friend Sarah was visiting from America and we went to Glentrool in the Galloway Hills. Glentrool, apart from being a beautiful mountainous region, cut through by tumbling burns and dotted with lochs, was the site of an important battle in 1307 that marked the start of Robert the Bruce’s campaign against the English dominion of Scotland, culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. When we were walking to a waterfall there with Sarah, Anna explained to her that ‘Glentrool was where Robert the Burns took his last stand.’ And thus, in one short sentence, managed to confuse Robert the Bruce, Robert Burns and General Custer, and to rewrite the outcome of a critical battle in Scottish history.

Till total £70.49

11 customers

Online orders: 7

Books found: 7

In the morning I unloaded the boxes of books about golf that I picked up from Callum’s on Saturday. I’ve tried to sell them on eBay as a job lot twice, but with no luck, so I will probably put them into the auction in Dumfries once I have checked whether there’s anything in there that’s worth listing online. Nicky can check that this weekend. The warehouse is starting to look a bit messy.

A customer wearing a huge chunky gold cross on a chain asked, ‘Do you have a section for old Bibles and church things?’ I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by ‘church things’, so I pointed him at the theology section. We do have some beautiful and very cheap old Bibles, but the people who ask for them never, ever buy them. He managed to find an unpriced miniature Bible from 1870 and asked me what the price would be. I told him £4. He didn’t buy it. There must be some kind of psychological effect created by finding an unpriced book. Whatever price you suggest when asked, however low, seems to be more than the customer is prepared to pay. I have lost count of the number of times people have brought books to the counter that we have yet to price up and said, ‘This one’s got no price on it. It must be free.’ It wasn’t funny the first time, and fourteen years later it has completely lost the sheen it never had in the first place.

Just before closing time a woman with a strong Yorkshire accent bought a cookbook and told me, ‘You’re not from round here.’ I replied that I was brought up here. Again, I have heard this so often that it is slowly driving me insane. She told me that my accent has a ‘strange twang’.

Till total £47

3 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

When I came downstairs from breakfast to open the shop, I discovered that Nicky had already arrived and switched everything on. She greeted me with her usual melodic ‘Helloooo!’ before scampering upstairs to put whatever horrors she had raided from the Morrisons skip last night into the fridge.

Eliot left at 2 p.m., leaving a pair of shoes behind, each shoe in a different room.

This morning, as I was working my way through a couple of bags of books, I found a shopping list in one of them. The handwriting looked very like Nicky’s. Among the things on the list were ‘Hair Gunk’, ‘Leg Razors’ and ‘Witch Face Wash’. When I asked Nicky about the shopping list, she denied all knowledge, telling me that she doesn’t shave her legs during winter and offering to show me as evidence.

At 2 p.m. I left the shop and drove to Dumfries to catch the London train and visit Anna in Hampstead for the weekend. I left Nicky with the thirty boxes of books about golf to check and list on Fulfilled By Amazon. She complained bitterly about it again, but reluctantly agreed to do it.

Read Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner on the journey south, an extraordinarily modern book considering it was written in 1824.

Till total £90.50

6 customers

In London.

Till total £305.48

28 customers

Online orders: 7

Books found: 4

Today was a beautiful sunny day. Callum called to see if I wanted to climb a hill, but I was alone in the shop so couldn’t.

At about noon a young family came into the shop: parents with a boy of about seven and a girl of about nine. The boy went straight to the children’s section and immersed himself there for an hour, until his parents told him that it was time to go for lunch, at which point he reluctantly dragged himself away from the chair near the children’s books and pleaded with his mother to buy him a copy of The House at Pooh Corner . She came to the counter and paid the £2.50 for a paperback copy with a look of exasperation, saying ‘I’ve never come across a child who reads as much – all he does is read. He spends every penny of his pocket money on books.’

Nicky didn’t manage to list a single book over the weekend because, as her note says: ‘The printer wilnae work.’ I checked: she hadn’t switched it on.

Local news today is that Bladnoch distillery has gone into liquidation.

Till total £47

3 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 6

Today was another beautiful day, and quite warm too. Nicky came in wisely wrapped up in scarf, hat and coat. Even on a cold day it is often warmer outside than it is in the shop.

Much of today was spent going through boxes of books I’ve had in storage for a year. They came from a large Victorian house near Castle Douglas. It was snowing heavily when I picked them up a year ago. The van struggled to haul the load up the slippery hill back onto the main road as I was leaving, and I thought I might have to spend the night in the house with the strange man from whom I had bought them, but it managed to get away. As I had no storage space at the time, I put the boxes in storage at Callum’s along with the golf books. Among the books I sorted through today was a rare pamphlet signed by Seamus Heaney. Harrington in London is offering the only other copy online for £225, so I put mine up at £140.

Old ladies’ art class upstairs – nobody died of exposure.

When I was closing up, I decided to open the cat flap again in the hope that the intruder has become bored with bashing his head against it and found someone else’s house to piss in.

Till total £49

6 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 3

Very quiet day.

Just before closing, Mr Deacon appeared, looking flushed and flustered, and asked if I could order a book about James I for his aunt, whose ninetieth birthday is next Friday. As always, he produced a review from The Times and left it with me to order. It should be here next week.

As I was locking up the back of the shop, I could hear the sound of geese honking on the salt-marsh at the bottom of the hill, the bleating of new-born lambs in the fields and the croaking of frogs in the pond in the garden. No people. No traffic. Growing up in rural Scotland, sounds like these are the familiar indicators of seasonal change, and for me the onset of spring is the highlight of the year. Once you’ve lived in a city for a few years, I suppose there’s a detachment from these signals of seasonal shift to which the frogs, the lambs and the geese – spring’s harbingers from the water, the land and the sky – alert you.