Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

This evening I started reading the copy of The Third Policeman that an old girlfriend gave to me years ago and I hadn’t got round to reading.

Till total £479.97

36 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

The last customer of the day was a young Italian woman who bought a two-volume edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron , dated 1679, which had been on the shelves for at least ten years. It was the only decent thing to come from the contents of a flat above a near-derelict Italian café in New Cumnock, which had belonged to an old woman who had died a few months before we were asked to clear the books by one of the executors of her estate.

I drove there on a dark, sleeting Monday night back in January 2003 after I had shut the shop, and met the woman who had been charged with the thankless task of disposing of the contents of the flat. The place was in a dreadful state; the roof was leaking badly, the floral wallpaper was peeling, bare bulbs clung to cobweb-covered cables from ceilings of exposed lath and crumbling plaster. There was no evidence of anything having been cleaned for years. It had clearly been inhabited by an elderly spinster; all the bedding was pink and covered with cat hair. There were probably two thousand books, all damp and thick with cat hair too, and – with the exception of the Decameron – every one of them was from The Book Club, a publisher that most booksellers avoid at all costs (the market for them is almost non-existent). While I was searching for something that might have made the trip worthwhile among the damp dross, the woman who met us explained that the last occupant had been the only daughter of an Italian immigrant who had come to Scotland in the 1920s. He had met and married a Scottish woman, and they had opened a café in an empty property below the flat. It had rapidly become the busiest place in the town, bustling and thriving.

The executor found a dusty chest of drawers, pulled one of them open and extracted a yellowed photograph album which contained hundreds of black-and-white photographs of the place in its heyday – full of smiling people, every table full, people dancing. When the Italian man died, a few years after his wife in the 1970s, he had handed on the business to his only child, his daughter, but times had changed and the business declined and eventually closed. Downstairs the big glass windows were boarded up, and the place – once busy – was as silent as the grave, save for the sound of the rain coming through the roof and dripping onto the floor. The optimism of that young Italian man, with his Scottish wife, his thriving business and his young daughter, the courage it took him to move to another country, learn a new language and start a business and a new life could never have anticipated the sad end that fate dealt to his dream. I am quite sure that the two-volume Decameron would have been among the few possessions he brought with him from Italy, and I wonder how long it might have been passed down through his family, only to end that inheritance here in a damp flat in New Cumnock with nobody to pass it on to. But now it will have a new life in the hands of the young woman who bought it today, and who knows what the next few hundred years will have in store for it?

Till total £248.28

21 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

Sandy the tattooed pagan dropped in to see if our stick supply needs to be topped up. We haven’t sold one for at least a month.

Telephone call from the council telling me that Andrew won’t be coming in any more as he found the experience too exhausting. I was growing to like him.

Mr Deacon dropped in at 4.20 p.m. to order a copy of Jenny Uglow’s A Gambling Man , a copy of which I had, by chance, put on the shelves earlier in the day. He was as delighted as he allows himself to become in company.

Till total £179.99

12 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 5

Two very sweet ginger-haired girls came in this morning and asked if this was Captain’s shop. They must be locals, or perhaps they follow the shop on Facebook. Captain’s fame has clearly spread wider than I had thought. While we were chatting about how fat Captain has become recently, a man in an extremely tight pair of shorts came to the counter and bought a book called The Book of Successful Fireplaces .

In the early afternoon a man who was probably about my age came in and kicked off his shoes, and left them by the door. I suppose I am not really in a position to criticise; quite often I wander about the place barefoot during the summer, but I am not sure if I would do it in anyone else’s shop.

Till total £340.35

35 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Nicky arrived in her summer ensemble, her ski suit now consigned to the winter wardrobe until November. Today’s outfit comprised a long skirt made from some sort of nettle fibre, and a home-made paisley shirt with a brown tunic (again home-made). She could easily pass for an extra from a low-budget adaptation of Robin Hood .

One of the books ordered today was for The Female Instructor , an early Victorian ‘guide to domestic happiness’. In today’s context it reads more like a guide to domestic abuse.

In the afternoon a customer asked if he could be videoed reading from his favourite book, so I set up the tripod and sat him by the fire. His reading was beautiful; he chose to read from Cold Comfort Farm , and read it in a lyrical Welsh accent. After he’d finished I was chatting to him and his wife and asked what they were doing in the area. She told me that they were on their way to Larne, to which I replied, ‘Why? It’s an awful place.’ Larne, apparently, is where they live.

Till total £319.70

30 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 5

Good Friday.

Katie was working in the shop today as Nicky was off doing Jehovah’s Witness things. Katie is a medical student who has worked in the shop for several summers and lacks any respect for me whatsoever. She moved here with her mother and sister from Oxford when she was a child.

A customer came to the counter and said, ‘I’ve looked under the W section of the fiction and I can’t find anything by Rider Haggard.’ I suggested that he had a look under the H section.

Till total £197.89

18 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Katie was in again today, covering for Nicky, so I asked her to package the books for the Random Book Club (which now has 163 members) and deal with the Royal Mail account for them. When I went to the post office to ask Wilma if the postman could pick them up, she told me that he could do it on Tuesday (Easter Monday = Bank Holiday).

As the shop was about to close, there was a telephone call from Mrs Phillips (‘I am ninety-three and blind, you know’), who couldn’t remember the title of Mrs Gaskell’s first novel and wanted to know if I could tell her.

Till total £250.49

17 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

The first customer brought in a book covered in bubble wrap and tissue paper. It was a theological work in Latin, dated 1716. He asked for a valuation, so I suggested that about £40 would probably a reasonable price for it, at which point he told me (indignantly) that Bonhams had valued it at £50.