Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

Callum and I had arranged to go for a bike ride after work, leaving here sharp at 5 p.m. so I was prompt with closing and started locking up at 4.55 p.m. I told the only customer in the shop – a woman who was in the Scottish room – that I had to close for an important meeting. She shuffled reluctantly into the front room and started looking at the cookery books. Just as I was explaining (again) about my important meeting and trying to manoeuvre her towards the door, Callum strolled in wearing what were clearly cycling clothes and holding a bike pump, shouting, ‘Right, are you ready to go on this bike ride then?’ The woman left amid a barrage of tutting.

Till total £179.48

24 customers

Things have changed a little since Orwell’s day. Perhaps the National Health Service has accommodated the ‘not quite certifiable lunatics’ who dogged his daily life in the bookshop back then or perhaps they’ve found some other equally frugal means of distracting themselves. We have one or two regular customers to whom this description might apply, but far more common today is the customer who will spend a few short minutes in the shop before leaving empty-handed, saying, ‘You could spend all day in this shop’, or the young couple who will find the most inconvenient place in which to park their vast, screaming Panzer of a pram while they sit exhausted in the armchairs by the wood-burning stove. Nowadays, when customers have that ‘aimless’ look about them, it is almost a certainty that it is because they are waiting for the pharmacist (three doors up) to fulfil their prescription or for the garage in Wigtown to call and tell them that their car has passed its MOT test and they can collect it.

While Amazon appears to benefit consumers, there is an unseen mass of people who suffer thanks to the punitive conditions which it imposes on sellers – authors have seen their incomes plummet over the past ten years, publishers too, which means that they can no longer take risks with unknown authors, and now there is no middleman. Amazon seems to be focused on matching if not undercutting competitors’ prices to the extent that it seems to be impossible to see how it can make money on some sales. This puts the squeeze not only on independent bookshops but also on publishers, authors and, ultimately, creativity. The sad truth is that, unless authors and publishers unite and stand firm against Amazon, the industry will face devastation. Amanda Foreman wrote an excellent piece about this in today’s Sunday Times .

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Laurie’s first day back at work in the shop. Predictably, there were massive problems with Monsoon. Laurie is a student at Napier University in Edinburgh, a place that she loathes with undisguised contempt. She has worked in the shop for the past couple of summers. I have taken her on for this summer, which will probably be her last before she enters the hideous world of attempting to find a real job.

For the first time in the thirteen years since I bought the shop, I have been left with no choice but to turn the radio off. Terry Waite is guest of the week in Rob Cowan’s Essential Classics on Radio 3.

Tracy, with whom I often compare notes about the general public, dropped in during her lunch break at the exact moment when a customer came to the counter. The customer put a book on the counter. When I picked it up to check the price, I noticed that there was an ancient ‘59p’ written in pencil on the first page next to our price sticker of £2.50. During the ensuing argument over which was the correct price, I could see Tracy attempting to stop herself from giggling. When the customer reluctantly accepted the price and said ‘I will just get rid of some change’, she lost all control and began laughing hysterically. The customer took five minutes to work out the correct change, which consisted entirely of 2p pieces and pennies.

Till total £330.49

16 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

Opened the shop five minutes late because the key jammed. The first customer of the day brought two Rider Haggard first editions to the counter, £8.50 each. At the same moment the thought ‘Those are seriously underpriced’ entered my head, he asked, ‘Will you do them for £13?’ When I refused to knock anything off them, he replied, ‘Well, you’ve got to ask, haven’t you?’ so I told him that, no, you do not have to ask.

After work I went for supper with Alastair and Leslie Reid in the cottage they rent from Finn and Ella in Garlieston. Alastair spoke of his first trip to America, which he took via London. A lecturer at the University of St Andrews, from which he had recently graduated, had given him the telephone number of a friend of his in London called Tom. Alastair duly arrived in London and telephoned ‘Tom’ to see if he could put him up for the night. ‘Tom’ turned out to be T. S. Eliot. Stewart Henderson, another friend who was there for supper, asked him ‘What did he smell like?’ to which Alastair – with no pause for thought – replied, ‘A musty pulpit, which is exactly what he would have wanted to smell like.’

Afterwards I asked Stewart – a poet who presents programmes on Radio 4, including Pick of the Week – what had possessed him to ask that question. He replied that he had once been interviewing the last survivor of a British brass band which Hitler had requested to perform a private concert for him before the Second World War. The interviewee was an elderly woman who evidently did not understand that Stewart was trying to extract more than ‘yes/no’ answers from her. Eventually, in despair, he decided that he would ask her ‘What did Hitler smell like?’, at which point she opened up completely and gave him all the material he could have hoped for.

Till total £125.38

19 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Today was surprisingly quiet in the shop, which afforded me the opportunity to sort through some of the piles of boxes of fresh stock that perpetually clutter the shop and price up some of it and put it on the shelves. With the constant stream of fresh stock coming into the shop it is a battle to keep the place tidy and organised, particularly now that we have to check prices online to see whether a book is worth listing. This has slowed the whole process down considerably.

The undoubted highlight of the day was when my mother appeared, excitedly clutching a book that I must have bought at least six years ago, back in the days when I used to store freshly bought stock in the shed at my parents’ house. I thought I’d cleared it all away, but she’d found a box and started rummaging through it and discovered a signed, numbered limited edition of W. B. Yeats’s The Winding Stair . The edition was limited to 642 copies, 600 of which had been signed by Yeats. It was unusual to see my mother, who is not a bookish person, so animated, but it was not about the value of the book – more because she had in her hands a book that the most famous poet of his generation from the land of her birth had once also held. I spent the rest of the day wondering how on earth I could have missed it when I bought it, and trying to remember where it had come from in the first place. No idea.