Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

At 2 p.m. the telephone rang. It was a woman at the council whose job it is to find work for people with learning difficulties:

Woman: ‘We have a young man looking for work in a bookshop. He has Asperger’s syndrome. Have you heard of Asperger’s syndrome?’

Me: ‘Yes.’

Woman: ‘Well, you know how some people with Asperger’s are really good at one specific thing, like maths or drawing?’

Me: ‘Yes.’

Woman: ‘Well, he’s not like that.’

So I agreed to take him on for a trial period. He starts on Tuesday.

Before the shop closed I stamped and bagged all the books for the Random Book Club, and (hopefully) charmed Wilma into sending the postman over in his van tomorrow to pick them up.

After years of buying, pricing, listing and selling books, certain publishers become very familiar to you: the significant quantities of books published by Macmillan in the early twentieth century; Blackie and Son with their distinctive Talwin Morris cover illustrations; A. & C. Black, with their famous Scottish travel guides; Fullarton and Cassell, two short-lived publishers who along with Newnes and Gresham embraced the technological revolution that enabled paper to be made from wood pulp in the mid-nineteenth century, and all of whose publications are distinctive for their waxy pages; Ward Lock, with their series of red travel guides to the UK; David & Charles, of Newton Abbot, whose books on regional railways are second to none; Hodder and Stoughton, who published the once desirable King’s England series, now no longer sought after; and Nelson, whose red cloth editions of John Buchan’s works still sell in healthy numbers.

Others stand out less for their design or style, and more for their content. Take Hooper and Wigstead, the publisher of Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland , whose pages contain the very first version to appear in a book of Burns’s Tam o’Shanter ; William Creech, who published Sir John Sinclair’s first Statistical Account of Scotland – and introduced the word ‘statistic’ to the English language; John Wilson, who produced the Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect ; John Murray, the publisher of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection ; William Strahan, who brought Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations to the world.

More recent publishers have had a similar impact: Penguin, whose unexpurgated British edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover saw them end up in court; Shakespeare & Company, who dared to publish Ulysses ; small presses such as William Morris’s short-lived Kelmscott Press; and the Golden Cockerel Press, for whom the artist Eric Gill (the typeface designer behind Gill Sans, Perpetua and others) designed a typeface which he named after the press. The list goes on, but these publishers – these individuals – took risks and brought new ideas to the world, each with their own distinctive style, from their subject matter to their design, typography and production values.

Till total £131.33

10 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

Bum Bag Dave came in shortly after the shop opened and bought three books from the aviation section. He is a knowledgeable character, scruffy and bushily bearded, and slightly paranoid that a firm of local solicitors has got it in for him, for some reason. His nickname derives from the fact that he is always adorned with at least two bum bags, one of which hangs around his neck, while the other is around his waist. On special occasions he has several more, and nearly always has a suitcase or rucksack too. He lives in nearby Sorbie and travels around all day on the bus, making use of whatever free facilities are available – the library and such. As he was leaving today, he asked me what time the bus to Whithorn leaves. When I told him that I had no idea, he replied, ‘You ought to know that sort of thing. You’re supposed to be providing a public service.’ This is news to me. He also has a digital watch that beeps every few minutes and at least one mobile phone that seems to be constantly emitting various irritating noises.

In the early afternoon an elderly man telephoned. He had found a book we are selling online for £3 and wanted to buy it directly. Due to his bad hearing and a lot of confusion, the whole process took half an hour. While he was on the telephone the postman appeared and removed the five bags of random books.

Bum Bag Dave was still shuffling about with his various beeping devices at 5.15 p.m. and asked if we have a section on pets. I told him, yes, but we were closed. At 5.25 p.m. he was still wandering about the shop, muttering about lawyers ripping him off.

Till total £107.49

14 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 4

Nicky was back in working today. We had the usual argument about her making a mess and putting books on the wrong shelves. She threatened to quit, which she usually does about once a month.

At lunchtime I left for Samye Ling, the Tibetan Buddhist retreat in Eskdalemuir. En route I picked up Anna from Dumfries railway station for a break from her London life.

Samye Ling has been considerably enlarged since I last visited twenty years ago, and is a spectacular incongruity in the bleak Scottish moorland, speckled with golden Buddhas, pagodas and colourful temples and buildings, as well as a smattering of semi-derelict Portakabins and other relics of the centre’s infancy. We found the library, and met Maggy, the librarian – a woman in her sixties in a wheelchair.

The library is new and is a massive unshelved room with piles of books on the floor. I went through the stock they want to dispose of and offered her £150. She clearly expected more, but when I told her that I was quite happy to leave them so that they could ask someone else in to look at them, there was a chorus of ‘No!’ from the other volunteers working there, so I had to take all the rubbish too, but there was some reasonable stock among it – a general mix of fiction and non-fiction, the sort of thing you’d normally find in someone’s house rather than what you might expect from the library of a Tibetan monastery. No doubt they have taken out all the material that would be appropriate for them to keep in their collection.

Anna was completely smitten with Samye Ling – the contrast between the landscape and the architecture, even between different parts of the place, some of which looked genuinely oriental while others looked as though they might have been built by the council shortly after the end of the Second World War.

We drove back to Wigtown and Anna’s demeanour relaxed as we grew closer to the shop. Her first instinct when she enters the shop is to find Captain, the cat, and within moments they were happily reunited.

The transformer on one of the lights in the Scottish room has blown. I am sick of changing light bulbs on those strings of lights, so bought three used French brass chandeliers from eBay.

Isabel came in to do the accounts. She and her husband have a farm near Newton Stewart, and Isabel is proficient in the accounting package SAGE. She has agreed to organise my accounts for me, thus relieving me of the most dreaded task of the week. She normally comes on Wednesday, but one of her daughters was performing in a concert this week, so she postponed. Her parting words today were ‘You’ve got lots of money in your account.’ Nobody has ever used those words in that order when speaking to me before.

Till total £122

11 customers