Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

The shop was extremely busy today, no doubt because it is school holiday time. At 5 p.m. a woman asked if her husband had left, so I told her that I had no idea who her husband was or what he looked like. She scowled and left.

Email in the inbox at closing from Crail Bookshop in Fife, which has just closed down. They have 12,000 books that they want to sell, and offered me a chance to look at them with a view to buying. I declined. Trade stock has usually been run down and the best books removed before it is sold as a single lot.

Another email from a collector in Edinburgh who has 13,000 books to sell. I replied asking for more information.

Till total £239.37

33 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

At 10.15 a.m. a woman walked in and roared, ‘I am in my element! Books!’, then continued to shout questions at me for an hour while she waddled about the shop like a ‘stately goose’, as Gogol describes Sobakevich’s wife in Dead Souls . Predictably, she didn’t buy anything.

Andrew arrived at 11 a.m. and worked until noon. He managed to finish the Cs in the crime section.

Just as I came downstairs from making a cup of tea, a man came to the counter with a copper bracelet from the table of antiques in the shop and asked, ‘C’est combien?’ Quite why he chose to speak in French I have no idea. He wasn’t even French; he was Scottish.

Eliot arrived at 4 p.m., and promptly removed his shoes. Within five minutes I had tripped on them twice.

Four customers commented on how fat Captain has become.

The shop was bustling all day, but I managed to finish Dead Souls despite this.

Till total £451.41

33 customers

Online orders: 1

Books found: 1

Unusually, Nicky was at work on time today; she’s occasionally ten minutes early but normally fifteen minutes late. She arrived clutching her hairbrush and toothbrush and ran upstairs to smarten herself up. She looked exactly the same when she came down. When I asked her why she was in such a flap, she replied, ‘Dinnae try to eat cold stir-fry when you’re driving. I went over a bump and most of it ended up going up my sleeves and down my cleavage.’

She dodged off for lunch just as an American family came in. Three generations. The grandfather came to the counter with three books, slammed them down and barked, ‘Here, lad’ at me, then thrust his credit card at the machine and followed with, ‘You people take credit cards, don’t you?’ while his grandchildren charged about the shop making chaos as their father shouted at them. He came to the counter with an eighteenth-century four-volume history of Scotland, priced at £100, and asked where our section on Badenoch was. When I told him that we don’t have a specific section on Badenoch, he ploughed on, telling me that that was where his family was from, as though this was somehow better than being from any other place. The sense of peace when they left was practically palpable but, in their defence, they bought the £100 set. They are redeemed.

Often, even after you’ve told customers that you do not have a copy of the book they’re looking for in stock, they will insist on telling you at great length and in tedious detail why they’re looking for that particular title. A few possible explanations for this have occurred to me, but the one by which I am most convinced is that it is an exercise in intellectual masturbation. They want you to know that this is a subject about which they are informed, and even if they are wrong about whatever they’ve chosen to pontificate on, they drone on – normally at a volume calculated to reach not only the cornered bookseller but everyone else in the vicinity too.

Finn, Anna and I were having a meeting in the kitchen when Eliot burst in, talking loudly on his phone. Rather than apologise for the intrusion, he kicked off his shoes and carried on talking. Eventually we moved into the drawing room, unable to compete with the volume of the one half of Eliot’s conversation that he was sharing with us.

Nicky stayed the night. Eliot had offered to buy supper at the pub, so I grabbed Nicky and we headed over. We had a couple of pints then came back. Nicky went straight to bed in the festival bed, while Eliot and I clattered about upstairs, just a few feet above her head.

Till total £537

24 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Awoke at 7 a.m. to the symphonic chaos of Eliot stomping, stamping and crashing around having baths, cups of tea, packing etc. before he finally left at 7.30 a.m. Shortly after that I heard Nicky stirring downstairs, making a tiny fraction of the noise that Eliot had, doing exactly the same things.

Nicky suggested that we make small posters asking customers to read a passage from their favourite book to us on film in the shop, to which I reluctantly agreed, then forced Carol-Ann to do one. Nicky chose for her a book aimed at eleven-year-olds from the children’s section. She looked deeply offended but read a bit anyway.

Till total £424

31 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Foodie Friday. Today Nicky brought in two egg custard tarts that she had pillaged from the skip. She had accidentally sat on one of them in her van.

At 11 a. m., as I came downstairs from making a cup of tea, a customer in socks and sandals accosted me and said, ‘I want to talk to you about the price of your copy of The Busconductor Hines . It says it is £65. Surely that can’t be right.’ So I checked online, and ours was indeed the cheapest first edition in a mint jacket available. He tutted and eventually came to the counter with a paperback edition of it priced at £2.50. Last week a similar thing happened involving a copy of Iain M. Banks’s Feersum Endjinn .

During lunch I overheard a group of customers in their early twenties discussing the shop. One of them said it was the ‘coolest shop’ she’d ever been in. Presumably she was referring to the temperature.

As I was locking up the back of the shop, I noticed that there were several large rafts of frogspawn in the pond.

Till total £182.49

19 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 2

Nicky turned up, as usual at this time of year, in her black ski suit. She looked as though she belonged in the freezer unit of an industrial butcher’s rather than a bookshop. This morning she told me that she ‘couldnae be bothered’ to process the orders on the Royal Mail system and that I could do it on Monday. I have given up the struggle with Nicky when it comes to this sort of thing. In the past, when I’ve asked her to do things, she has nodded enthusiastically then completely ignored what I have said and proceeded to do whatever she feels like doing. She is reliable and industrious, though, and exceptionally entertaining. And she loves the shop and does whatever she can to improve the stock and make the business work better. It is just slightly unfortunate that we have different opinions about what those things are.

The wind today was a cold easterly, so I lit the fire at 10 a.m. Plenty of customers. As I was walking through the shop putting fresh stock on the shelves, I spotted three young boys quietly reading on the festival bed. I normally discourage customers from going onto the festival bed, largely because it is usually children who treat it as a play area and mess it up, after which I have to go up and tidy it. There’s a rope across the access, but these boys must have crawled under it. It would have taken a heart of stone to tell them to move, as they sat there, quietly engrossed.