Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

Till total £28.49

4 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

Nicky was in today as she’s taking tomorrow off (Friday and Saturday are her usual two days). She began the day by complaining about the smell of cat pee again. I told her that it’s a stray, and that Mike in the co-op has borrowed a trap from Cats Protection and is trying to catch it. She still blamed Captain. Mike’s garden backs onto mine and Captain is as frequent a visitor in his kitchen as his cats are in mine. The stray has been spraying in his house too.

Eliot has asked me to help write a business plan for The Open Book idea so that we can work out if it can stand on its own financially. If it can, then it will operate under the umbrella of the Festival Company. The Open Book is a plan that Anna, Finn and Eliot have come up with: they want to take an empty shop in the town that has accommodation above it and give people the opportunity to come and run it for a fortnight so that they know what it is like be a bookseller. Finn is a friend from childhood who lives nearby. He’s an organic dairy farmer, and one of the wittiest people I know. About ten years ago he was co-opted to be the chairman of what was then the Wigtown Festival volunteer group. Within a year he had turned it into the Wigtown Festival Company, a charity (which meant it could access new funds), and transformed it from a few inexperienced but enthusiastic volunteers into a slick, professional organisation with full-time, paid staff. After a few years off, he is now back on the board of trustees. I thought I’d do some research for the business plan, so I googled ‘Run a Bookshop’. Ironically, top of the list is a book for sale on Amazon called The Complete Guide to Starting and Running a Bookshop .

In the early afternoon I received a phone call from a woman at Yell.com regarding my Yellow Pages advert and online listing. She asked me if my business was ‘located in Wigwamshire’, which she referred to as a ‘locality area’, and continued that she would give me ‘an example, for example’. She also described my Yell.com web site as having a ‘completely different look, but very similar’. To what, I have no idea.

Seven people brought boxes of books to the shop to sell today. As is often the way at this time of year, I bought more than I sold.

Till total £120

9 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

No Nicky today. She is de-cluttering, apparently. One of today’s online orders was for a book about instruments measuring radioactivity, for a customer in Iran. At 11.30 a.m. the telephone rang. It was Nicky: ‘Do you want my fridge? I am getting rid of everything that runs on electricity.’ The moment she opens her mouth a gem of some sort will emerge, fully formed.

Mother appeared at 2 p.m. with four hanging baskets for the front of the shop, all planted up. She does this every year, despite my protestations that I am quite capable of doing it myself.

Till total £42

3 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

Today’s first customer was a short man with a wispy beard who suddenly appeared at the counter, startling me. He grinned and said, ‘You’ve got some stuff here, haven’t you? Some stuff. Some stuff.’ He bought a copy of The Hobbit. I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.

After lunch a customer asked if we had a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. We didn’t, but a few moments after he had left, a woman brought in two boxes of books to sell, one of which contained a copy. It’s much more rewarding when this happens the other way around.

Till total £78.98

13 customers

Online orders: 7

Books found: 6

One of today’s orders was for a book called Sexing Day-Old Chicks.

The first customer of the day was an unusually smartly dressed Maltese woman who told me that there are no second-hand bookshops in Malta. I’m not quite sure what she was doing in Wigtown, but she seemed pleasant, even if she didn’t buy anything. Just as she was leaving, the telephone rang. It was the librarian from Samye Ling Buddhist centre in Eskdalemuir, about sixty miles away. They have been clearing old stock and want to sell some of it. I have arranged to visit them next week.

My mother came into the shop when it was fairly busy and started to share her less than flattering opinions about the SNP at considerable volume. She comes from the west of Ireland, and despite having lived in Scotland for nearly fifty years, retains the lilt of the country of her childhood. Or so I am assured by my friends – it is undetectable to my ear. She has a capacity for talking that I am quite convinced is unparalleled in the world, and she abhors a silence the way that nature abhors a vacuum. On several occasions I have witnessed her say the same thing (normally a description of what she had for lunch that afternoon, or where she went that morning) in over a dozen different ways in a single breath. My father, by contrast, is a quiet man. This he attributes to the lack of opportunity to speak afforded by my mother’s incessant babble. He is a tall man, 6 foot 3, and trained as an engineer, but he turned to farming in his late twenties. Between them, they have managed to build several businesses and send my two sisters and me to boarding school.

Unannounced visits from family and friends are not uncommon and are certainly not the exclusive preserve of my mother. Familiar visitors often openly talk about things I would not deem fit for strangers’ ears. It often strikes me that perhaps bookshops primarily play a recreational role for most people, being peaceful, quiet places from which to escape the relentless rigours and digital demands of modern life, so that my friends and family will quite happily turn up unannounced and uninvited to interrupt whatever I happen to be doing with little or no regard for the fact that it is my workplace. If I was working in the co-op or the library, I doubt whether they’d take such a cavalier approach to casual social visits. Nor, I suspect, would they speak quite so freely in the company of complete strangers in any other workplace.

After I had closed the shop I called Mr Deacon to let him know that the biography of James I he ordered has arrived.

Till total £41

4 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

The morning was cold and damp, so I lit the fire. By 11 a.m. there had been five customers through the door; not one of them bought anything. Then a tall, emaciated man in a hoodie came in and asked if we had any books on pharmacology because ‘they’ve just put me on this new heroin substitute and I want to find out more about it’.

Mr Deacon appeared at lunchtime and paid for the book he’d ordered. His aunt’s birthday is on Saturday, so he should have time to send it to her.

Till total £82.99

9 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

At 10.30 a.m. I went upstairs to make a cup of tea. When I came back downstairs, I was met with a familiar, earthy smell. No sooner had I sat down and started listing books than a short, very scruffy, bearded Irishman shot out from behind a shelf. His appearance (and smell) disguise a man whose knowledge of books is remarkable. He brings me a load of good material about twice a year, delivered in his van, in which he clearly lives. This time he brought four boxes of books on railways and two boxes of books about Napoleon, for which I gave him £170.