Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

As it was a pleasant day, I spent much of it working in the garden. By mid-afternoon it was too hot, so Anna and I went to the beach at Garlieston and had a swim in the sea.

When I was locking up the shop, the telephone rang. It was a local woman who had books to sell, mostly Folio Society:

‘You’ll have to come to my house to view them, I am housebound.’

‘How would next Tuesday suit?’

‘As long as it’s not in the morning, the nurse comes on Tuesday morning to dress a wound on my leg. It’s terrible. Weeping sore, had it for years. Oozes the most disgusting pus.’

I have arranged to visit her on the afternoon of the 24th.

Till total £237.49

17 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Today both online orders were Amazon, no AbeBooks orders – the reverse of yesterday.

Another day of blazing sunshine, but I was stuck in the shop as Nicky and Laurie were both unavailable. Jim McMaster arrived at 9 a.m. for a poke around the shop. He went through the boxes from the Glasgow deal, only a few of which we had processed and shelved in the previous two weeks. Jim is a book dealer from Perthshire. He started out in the book trade as a runner for Richard Booth in Hay-on-Wye. A runner buys books to sell to the trade, usually on request – so, for example, Booth might say to Jim, ‘I need 500 books on African wildlife’, and Jim would set off in a car or van and scour bookshops throughout the country for bargains until he had 500. Jim has an encyclopaedic knowledge of books. When I started out, in 2001, he could scarcely have been more helpful, giving me pointers here and there each time he came to the shop. He is one of the few dealers who will still visit other dealers’ shops in search of fresh stock, and on the occasions when I have bought large quantities of books from people – in 2008 I cleared 12,000 books from a house in Gullane, near Edinburgh – Jim has come down and sorted through them, shifting bulk quantities to his contacts in the trade. He is a well-known, well-respected and well-liked figure in the second-hand book trade. Oddly enough, I was reading The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller this morning and came across a passage that reminded me of David McNaughton, from whom I acquired the book signed by Florence Nightingale. Jim and David belong to the old school, and Baxter’s words resonated when I read them:

I say that these old fellows are the backbone of the book trade. As they drop off one by one, like leaves from a tree, there is a gap which no modern pushful young salesman can fill, and they leave a memory that is a good deal more fragrant than the smelly hair-oil of those Smart Alecs who come asking me for a job in the confident tones of one who is quite prepared to teach me my own business.

Not that Jim is particularly old, or in danger of dropping off.

At 11 a.m. the telephone rang – it was Mr Deacon: ‘My apologies for the quality of the line. I am in Patagonia. Could you order me a copy of In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin? I will be back next week.’

An American woman spent an hour taking books off the shelves in the children’s section and checking prices on Amazon on her laptop. Right in front of me, completely shamelessly. Before I had the opportunity to rebuke her for this practice, the postman arrived to pick up the Random Book Club sacks, and by the time he and I had loaded them into his van, she had vanished.

The shop was quiet all afternoon until 4.59 p.m., when a middle-aged couple wandered in, the man humming irritatingly to himself. Both headed straight for the boxes of fresh unpriced stock from Stuart Kelly and began raking through them, taking things out and piling them up all over the floor. They left at 5.10 p.m. without putting any of them back or buying anything, complaining loudly that the shop should be open until 7 p.m. Boxes of fresh stock attract customers like moths to a flame.

Any bookseller will tell you that, even with 100,000 books neatly sorted and shelved in a well-lit, warm shop, if you put an unopened box of books in a dark, cold, dimly lit corner, customers will be rifling through it in a matter of moments. The appeal of a box of unsorted, unpriced stock is extraordinary. Obviously the idea of finding a bargain is part of it, but I suspect it goes well beyond that and has parallels with opening gifts. The excitement of the unknown is what it’s all about, and it’s something to which I can relate – buying books is exactly that. Driving towards any book deal, whether a private collection, an institution or a business, there’s always the same slight quickening of the pulse which comes with the anticipation that there might be something really special in this lot; and there often is, whether it’s an early Culpepper, incunabula, an early Ian Fleming first in a mint jacket, a fine calf craft-binding or just something that you’ve never come across before. I have yet to find a book bound in human skin, but a dealer I know once found one in a house in Castle Douglas.

Till total £163.99

17 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 5

Nicky was in today. Her plan to turn her van into a mobile shop has been temporarily put on hold because the back door won’t open. She has decided instead that she is going to buy an old mobile library from the council and convert that.

In the morning I started going through Hamish Grierson’s books, which he had dropped off when I was in Dunkeld. Hamish is a retired antique dealer and a book collector, so a regular customer. The books were mainly about prehistory and in good condition. When I was checking the prices of some of the more interesting books from his collection on AbeBooks to see what other people are selling them for so that I could work out a fair price for him, I told Nicky that I was going to offer him £100 for them, to which she replied, as she always does, that I ought to halve the figure.

Anna insisted that, since it was a clear, sunny day, we climb Cairnsmore, the granite lump of a hill on the far side of Wigtown Bay. We left at 3 p.m. and reached the summit at 4.30 p.m. and were back home by 6.30 p.m. It is always entertaining doing this sort of thing with Anna: it is always she who suggests it, then very soon into the adventure she will start complaining bitterly about it, becoming increasingly vocal and miserable. Then, once it is done, she will announce, ‘Wow, that was awesome.’ On one occasion we decided to cycle forty miles around forestry tracks in the Galloway Hills. After about twenty miles of steadily escalating complaints, she dismounted, lay on a rock and said, ‘Leave me here. Save yourself.’

Till total £155.44

23 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 5

Laurie was in the shop today, so I drove Anna to Dumfries in the morning to catch the train to London. I am not sure when she will be back in Wigtown again. It depends, I suppose, on how she gets on with her various projects, which now include the Rockets script, as well as a NASA documentary, a young adult novel and a romantic comedy script on which she has been working with her friend Romiley.

After lunch I telephoned Hamish Grierson to offer him £100 for his books. He was not very happy about it at all and complained that there were some valuable books in there. This is bad news, as Nicky has already priced most of them up and put them out on the shelves. He told me he will call back on Monday with more information.

At closing time a man telephoned to ask if I could look at his book collection at the Schoolhouse in Port Logan, a pretty fishing village south of Stranraer. I have arranged to go there tomorrow afternoon.