Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

It is unfortunate that Wigtown’s most famous daughters came to such an unedifying end. Wigtown has put forth many significant people into the world, among them Helen Carte, who (along with her husband Richard) ran the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company; Paul Laverty (who is Ken Loach’s screenwriter) was at Wigtown’s now defunct Catholic school; the botanist John McConnell Black and footballer Dave Kevan are sons of Wigtown too. Indeed, the actor James Robertson Justice – a one-time resident of the town – so loved the place that on a number of occasions he falsely claimed it as his birthplace.

Till total £301

14 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 1

Three orders, all Amazon; only found one. One of the missing books was Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, which Nicky had listed as being on shelf Q6 in the Scottish room, despite its being a book about Afghanistan, written by a man who was born in Hong Kong. Perhaps the Scottish-sounding name confused her. As I was taking the sacks of mail over to Wilma, I bumped into Jock, who used to work in the shop when John Carter owned it. Jock is famous for his long-winded and frankly unlikely stories. They usually involve someone trying to trick him, and then him spotting their ruse and getting the better of them. Almost all of them end up in a fight, which he inevitably wins. He is notoriously difficult to understand both because of his strong accent and dialect, and because he has no teeth. Today he told me about a woman whose garden he works in once a week. According to Jock, she’s not a very good driver because of her poor vision. ‘She’s got carrots in her eyes.’

At 12.15 p.m. a customer telephoned to tell me that he’d bought a book from us which was the first in a ‘triology’. It had cost him £7.20, including postage, and he was very happy with it. He now wants to buy volume II, but our copy of volume II is the only copy available online and is £200, which he wasn’t prepared to pay. He wanted it for the same price as he had paid for volume I. I tried to explain that as ours was the only copy available online it was a much more scarce book, and the price remained at £200. He told me he was ‘disgusted’ and hung up.

Following a conversation with Anna, I am considering organising a Random Book Club event in London – probably a talk by an author, but the audience won’t know who the author will be until the talk starts. I emailed Robert Twigger, and he is happy to help out. Rob is a regular at Wigtown Book Festival, and normally stays in my house for the full ten days. He is a writer, and has won many awards and prizes: his best-known work is probably Angry White Pyjamas , for which he won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. He is an adventurer and an explorer, an extremely entertaining man, and I count myself very lucky to know him, and to have him as a good friend. He lived with his family in Cairo until the revolution of 2011, after which they decided to move back to the UK. He now lives in Dorset. During the September book festival last year I noticed that Eliot had unplugged one of my table lamps and had plugged in his Kindle. This was an affront on so many levels that when I pointed it out to Rob, he decided that the best form of revenge was to download a book called Two in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting onto it. I doubt whether his wife was terribly impressed.

Callum and I went for a pint after I had closed the shop, then I nipped to the co-op for some milk. Mike was working, and he looked more than a little sheepish. I asked him how the newly neutered stray cat was settling in, and he told me that he had been verbally abused by a woman yesterday who had come into the co-op and accused him of stealing her cat. Apparently she had been looking for it for weeks, since it had run away. She was not best pleased to hear it has had its balls chopped off.

Till total £103.99

12 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

Nicky in, as always fifteen minutes late and armed with an excuse which, however unlikely it sounds, I know is the truth. Today’s offering was that she’d dropped an éclair that she was eating (raided from the Morrisons skip) on her lap while she was driving and had to stop and clean her skirt before the chocolate melted into it. I made her a cup of tea in a different mug from her customary MacDonald tartan one. She is particularly fussy about bone china, and a common porcelain mug appeared to cause her undue confusion. Shortly after she arrived, Smelly Kelly, her Brut 33-soaked suitor appeared and tried to convince her to join him for some sort of family reunion. She was having none of it.

One of today’s orders was for a book titled A History of Orgies .

Another new Random Book Club member signed up today.

At 11 a.m. an extremely large woman brought in six boxes of cookery books, mostly about dieting. I gave her £70 for them.

After lunch I brought in the eight boxes of railway books I picked up on Thursday in Glasgow. As I was stacking them in the front of the shop, a man (who had managed to position himself so that I had to say ‘excuse me’ with every single box I brought in) asked me ‘Are those more boxes of books?’, as if he had unearthed a dark secret. When I told him that they were, he laughed loudly for an uncomfortably long time.

When you deal with large numbers of different people every day, you start to notice behavioural patterns. One of the more curious for me is to see what people laugh at. I have no idea why that customer found it so unimaginably amusing that a bookseller was bringing boxes of books into a bookshop. Quite often it is something that isn’t the slightest bit amusing that triggers laughter, and even more frequently people will laugh at one of their own banal comments or observations. Sometimes it appears to be used as a sort of punctuation mark to denote the end of a sentence. I once bought a psychology library from a house in Cumbria, among which was a book called Laughter , by Robert R. Provine. According to him, only primates have the capacity to laugh, and ‘there are thousands of languages, hundreds of thousands of dialects, but everyone speaks laughter in pretty much the same way’. Nor is laughter particularly confined to humour; speakers tend to laugh 20 per cent more than their audiences. Despite this, and the fact that laughter is clearly social shorthand for amicability, the things at which customers laugh still baffle me.

After work I went down to my parents’ house to fix Mum’s ‘constipated’ iPad. One of their friends was there, and we had a long conversation about pets, during which he confessed that he never gives his dogs food that he would not be prepared to eat himself. On a number of occasions this has resulted in him eating tinned dog food.

Till total £345.87

23 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 6

One order was for the Penguin edition of John Steinbeck’s letters, which we had listed a few weeks ago for £5. It sold online for £24. At the time of listing, ours was price-matched against the cheapest copy online, which must have sold, and ours has been re-priced against the next cheapest, which was £24. This usually works the other way round and books online become cheaper as dealers undercut one another.

Our Amazon seller status has dropped from Good to Fair again, thanks to the unfulfilled orders from Friday and Saturday.

Sold a book called The Dieter’s Guide to Weight Loss During Sex to an American woman.

When I was sorting through the books that a man had brought in in bin-liners on Saturday, I found a woven Victorian bookmark in a book onto which were stitched the words ‘I love little Pussy’ with a picture of a cat beneath it.