Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

One of the orders today was for a book called Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants.

Till total £162.43

18 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Telephone call at 11 a.m. from someone who asked ‘How do you go about doing book readings in your shop?’ Further scrutiny revealed that his genre is fantasy and that he wants to read from his latest book, which is about mermaids – ‘It’s set in the sea.’ It is hard to imagine where else it could be set.

At 2 p.m. a customer came to the counter with a beautifully illustrated book on salmon fishing from the 1920s which he had found in the Garden Room. It was unpriced. He asked how much it was, and – feeling generous – I said, ‘You can have it for £2.50.’ He walked out muttering, ‘I’ll get it for less on Amazon.’ So I checked the book shortly afterwards and found that the cheapest Amazon copy is £22. It is now priced at £12 in the shop, but I doubt he will be back.

As I was about to close the shop, there was a telephone call from a woman in Moffat who has a legal library to sell. I tend to avoid these as they are not easy to sell on, but you never know what else you might find among them, so I arranged to go and view the collection on Saturday.

The postman picked up the seven sacks of parcels for the Random Book Club at 4.30 p.m.

Till total £286.49

22 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

A man smelling of TCP was the only customer in the shop for the first hour of opening, during which time I attempted to put out fresh stock. He had an uncanny ability to be standing in front of every shelf to which I needed access, regardless of the subject or where in the shop the relevant shelves were.

Till total £233.48

19 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Nicky was in today so that she can take tomorrow off. She decided to eat her breakfast in the shop instead of her van. Normally she devours it while she is driving in to work, which inevitably results in most of it covering her hessian skirt and Robin Hood tabard.

An elderly customer told me that her book club’s next book was Dracula , but she couldn’t remember what he’d written.

I noticed that two of the three Creme Eggs my mother gave me were missing.

Till total £160.70

14 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

No Nicky today, so no revolting gourmet delights from the Morrisons skip.

After lunch a customer brought in four boxes of books: ‘You’ll love these, they’re all best-sellers.’ I picked out a few books and offered him £5. He looked horrified and announced that he would rather give them to the charity shop, where – he confidently assured me – ‘they appreciate quality’.

The phenomenon of the best-seller in the publishing industry does not seem to translate into the same financial cash cow in the second-hand book industry. Perhaps people who buy into the bestseller concept will always buy their books new, to be on the crest of the wave as it breaks rather than the troughs behind it. Perhaps also because the Dan Browns and Tom Clancys of this world are published in such vast quantities that there is never any scarcity value in them for the dealer or the collector. What passes for a best-seller in the new book market is precisely the sort of book that will be a dog in the second-hand trade. Customers often fail to understand this and think that their first edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is worth a fortune, when in fact 12 million of them were printed. As an author’s success and fame increase, so too will the size of the print runs of their successive books. Hence a first edition of Casino Royale (of which only 4,728 first edition hardbacks were printed) will be worth considerably more than a copy of The Man with the Golden Gun , which had a first-edition, first-issue print run of 82,000.

Till total £243.40

20 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

Nicky was in today. I asked her if she knew what happened to the box of three Creme Eggs that my mother had given me for Easter and which had been behind the counter. She denied all knowledge of them at first, then told me that she’d had to give one to a ‘crying child who had tripped over a rug in the shop’. When I asked her if she’d eaten any of them, she replied, ‘Maybe just a wee nibble.’ The crying child was clearly her. She eventually confessed to eating them all, telling me, ‘I don’t know why. I dinnae even like Creme Eggs.’

A customer appeared at the counter at 10 a.m. and asked ‘Where are the children’s books?’ I pointed towards the children’s section and replied ‘They’re just through that door there.’ The customer turned 180 degrees from where I’d just pointed and aimed her finger towards the front door of the shop, through which she had – literally seconds earlier – entered the building, and said, ‘What, that door there?’

After lunch I drove to Moffat to view the library of a firm of solicitors that had closed a few years earlier. Probably forty boxes. Most were of little interest, so I just took the Session Court volumes, roughly 150 of them, in fairly standard legal bindings. I’ll sell them on eBay as a job lot. Bindings like these used to sell for about £300 a yard, so it will be interesting to see what these make. There are seven yards of them.

I returned to the shop to the unmistakable reek of Smelly Kelly’s Brut 33, but fortunately I missed him by a few minutes.

Till total £269.99

24 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

Shortly after I opened the shop there was a telephone call about a book that a customer had ordered online. It arrived on Saturday, and she wasn’t happy about it because the last five pages were torn: ‘I’ve got a thing about books with torn pages, they give me the creeps. Can I return it?’ I reluctantly agreed to let her send it back for a refund.

At 4.30 p.m. a man with a moustache and a baseball cap asked, ‘You don’t sell books, do you?’ then laughed uproariously.

Till total £92.96

13 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

The Maltese woman who had been in the shop in March (complaining that there were no second-hand bookshops in Malta) dropped in to introduce herself. Her name is Tracy, and she had been here back then for an interview in the Osprey Room with the RSPB, for the job of being their representative. There is a pair of ospreys that has returned to a nest just outside Wigtown for the past six years; the RSPB has a live video link to the nest in the County Buildings. She is here for the summer to work there, although quite what she is going to do is a subject of much speculation since there is no sign of the ospreys as yet this year.

Three customers, on entering the shop, complained that they couldn’t see anything in the shop because it was so bright outside and their eyes had not adjusted. This is far from unusual and often explained in a tone suggesting that I am personally responsible for the involuntary reflex of the customer’s irises.

I finished The Third Policeman during the afternoon, when the shop was quiet.

Till total £121.98

12 customers