Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

Nicky arrived at 9.15 a.m., as usual, and after a brief repeat of yesterday’s row, a new argument followed concerning what she ought to be working on in the shop. We agreed to make a list every morning of what needs to be done so that there is no confusion. Later in the day I found she had made a few additions, including ‘Remind Shaun several times to call people back’, ‘Take Shaun seriously’, ‘Do not waste valuable time poncing about in front of the camera for Facebook’, ‘Offer the customer at least three times the value of the books he’s selling’. To my delight she has recently acquired a half-hearted suitor. Every time he sees her van (Blue-bottle) parked near the shop, he drops in to say hello and chat to her. He is invariably intoxicated, regardless of the time of day, and he attempts to conceal the smell with overpowering quantities of Brut 33. Nicky makes little, if any, effort to disguise her dislike for him, but this seems only to fuel his ardour.

After lunch I went to the co-op to buy milk. Mike told me that he had caught the stray tom-cat which has been spraying in his house and my shop. Captain will be relieved. He has been jumpy for weeks, and the place has reeked of cat piss.

Anna, Lucy and I went to Galloway House Gardens in the afternoon and picked wild garlic, then spent the evening making wild garlic pesto, using olive oil, parmesan and walnuts. This is one of Anna’s highlights of the year.

Nicky found a book in the Samye Ling collection called Vamping Made Easy. Disappointingly, it is about piano scales.

Mr Deacon dropped in to order a book shortly before closing, and confirmed that his aunt had received and was delighted with the biography of James I.

Till total £97

10 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 6

Nicky took today off, so I was alone in the shop again. Six orders today, including one on Scottish medieval poetry, which is shipping to Baghdad.

An elderly couple came in after lunch, wielding a Farmfoods bag full of books. This is never a promising start. They had been clearing an aunt’s house and had come across a few old books which, it transpired, were part of an incomplete set of Dickens – in dreadful condition – from the 1920s. They wanted a valuation. As the husband produced the first book, I told him that it was worth nothing. He clearly did not believe me and continued to produce the others, one at a time, asking, ‘How about that one?’ I tried to explain that there was no point in showing me any more if they were all from the same set, but five minutes later he was still proffering them.

I went upstairs in the late afternoon, but by the time I got to the kitchen another voice was summoning me down. Standing in the shop was a tall hipster with a beard and tweed cap, holding a Tesco bag full of books. A Tesco bag is an improvement on a Farmfoods bag in terms of the quality of books it is likely to contain, but only a marginal one, and the books in this particular case were indeed better but still stock of which I already had an abundance, so I rejected them, primarily because he kept calling me ‘Buddy’.

Till total £105

12 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 5

Half an hour late opening the shop this morning because I forgot that the clocks had gone forward.

Monsoon was playing up, so I checked the settings. By chance this led me to discover some of Nicky’s ‘Frequently Used’ notes for describing books on our online listings:

‘no ink marks’

‘which looks to be unread’

‘some lovely pictures!’

Normally the notes I would use for describing books would be along the lines of:

‘Previous owner’s name on front free endpaper’

‘Blind stamped front board, five raised bands’

‘Deckled edges to pages, bevelled boards’

But, as Nicky frequently points out, these are terms that are only of use when talking to other people in the trade. They are unhelpful when dealing with people who have no understanding of the jargon of books. Ian, my bookseller friend from Grimsby, often has this conversation with his wife, who believes that the language of book jargon belongs to a bygone age and that the internet has made it all but redundant, with the exception of auction catalogues. When I bought the shop in 2001, before the internet morphed into the monstrous retail machine that it has in part become, many booksellers would send out catalogues of their stock to customers on their mailing lists, and by necessity they would have to provide detailed descriptions of the titles they were selling, but the use of vocabulary such as ‘gilt dentelles’, ‘verso’ or ‘recto’, ‘octavo’, ‘fleuron’ and ‘colophon’ has since become almost irrelevant to the selling of books. To my knowledge there is nobody in the trade who still sends out catalogues, and with the swift and apparently inexorable decline in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, I fear that we may go the same way. Our times, though, are not the first transitional period in the history of publishing and bookselling. As Jen Campbell points out in The Bookshop Book , following Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and the first ‘mass market’ books becoming available, ‘Vespasiano da Bisticci, a famous bookseller in Florence, was so outraged that books would no longer be written out by hand that he closed his shop in a fit of rage, and became the first person in history to prophesy the death of the book industry.’

Our Amazon status has shot back up to Good again.

Since it was a pleasant day, I painted the benches in front of the shop during lunch. An elderly neighbour with whom I have a nodding acquaintance was passing (I had bought the books from her late sister’s estate several years previously). She was making her way towards the co-op with her shopping trolley and stopped in front of the shop and started chatting. She told me that she had spent a good deal of money on her garden bench fifteen years ago because it was the first garden she had ever owned and she felt like treating herself. When I asked her where she’d lived before Wigtown, she listed a number of places, including Tokyo and Jerusalem, where she helped create the first Hebrew dictionary. I had no idea that she had led such an interesting life. Ah, the dangers of making assumptions about people. No doubt I do it on a daily basis with my customers, and dismiss people as key-jangling buffoons when they may well have led soldiers onto the beaches of Normandy or pioneered ground-breaking medical research.

After lunch I drove to Dumfries and dropped Anna and Lucy at the railway station to return to London (each armed with a jar of wild garlic pesto) and was back in the shop by 4 p.m.

For the last hour of the day the shop was occupied by a family of six – mum, dad and four girls aged between six and sixteen. When the time came to pay for their books, the mother told me that they had all been out for a walk in the morning and the girls had been miserable, despite the sunny weather. She had asked why they were so unhappy and they replied in unison that all they wanted to do was visit The Book Shop as they hadn’t been here for two years and were really excited about returning. They spent £175 and left with six bags of books. These things happen far too rarely, but when they do they serve as a welcome reminder of why I chose to enter the world of bookselling, and of how important bookshops are to many people.

My mother came in at 4 p.m. and dropped off a box of three Creme Eggs for Easter. I’m not overly fond of chocolate, but my appetite for it is quite unsophisticated. Anna is very partial to extremely strong dark chocolate, as is Callum, and they regularly gang up to mock me for having the same taste as a small child. On the rare occasions during which I am afflicted by a craving, mine is for sugary milk chocolate and Creme Eggs are exactly what I want.