Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

Norrie (former employee, now working as a self-employed joiner) came in at 9 a.m. to repair a leak on the roof of the Fox’s Den, the summerhouse in the garden.

Over these past fifteen years members of staff have come and they have gone, but – until recently – there has always been at least one full-time employee. Some have been splendid, some diabolical; nearly all remain friends. In the early years I took on students to help in the shop on Saturdays, which the full-time staff did not like to work, and between 2001 and 2008 turnover increased steadily and strongly, despite the obvious trend towards buying online. Then – after Lehman Brothers went to the wall in September of that year – things nose-dived and turnover was back where we started in 2001, but with overheads that had risen considerably during the good times.

Norrie and I built the Fox’s Den a few years ago, and during Wigtown’s annual book festival we use it as a venue for very small and unusual events. Last year the most tattooed man in Scotland gave a twenty-minute talk about the history of tattooing, and stripped down to his underpants to illustrate various elements of it as the talk progressed. An elderly woman, mistaking the building for a toilet, inadvertently wandered in towards the end of the talk to find him standing there, almost naked. I’m not sure that she has recovered.

As he was leaving, Norrie and Nicky had a heated discussion about something that I caught the tail end of. It appeared to be about evolution. This is a favourite topic of Nicky’s, and it’s not uncommon to find copies of On the Origin of Species in the fiction section, put there by her. I retaliate by putting copies of the Bible (which she considers history) in among the novels.

Found a book called Gay Agony , by the unlikely-sounding author H. A. Manhood, as I was going through the theology books brought in by the retired minister. Apparently Manhood lived in a converted railway carriage in Sussex.

Till total £67

4 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

Today Nicky covered the shop so that I could travel to Leeds to look at a private library of 600 books on aviation. Anna and I left the shop at 10 a.m., and as we were leaving, Nicky advised, ‘Look at the books, think of a figure, then halve it.’ She also told me that when the apocalypse comes and only the Jehovah’s Witnesses are left on earth (or whatever her version of the apocalypse is – I do not pay much attention when she starts on religion), she intends to come round to my house and take my stuff. She keeps eyeing up various pieces of my furniture with this clearly in mind.

Anna is my partner, and is an American writer twelve years my junior. We share the four-bedroom flat above the shop with a black cat called Captain, named after the blind sea captain in Under Milk Wood . Anna worked for NASA in Los Angeles and came to Wigtown for a working holiday in 2008 to fulfil an ambition to work in a bookshop in Scotland, near the sea. There was an immediate attraction between us, and following a brief return to California, she decided to come back. In 2012 her story piqued the interest of Anna Pasternak, a journalist who was visiting Wigtown during the book festival that year, and she wrote a piece for the Daily Mail about it. Soon afterwards Anna was approached by a publisher who wanted her to write a memoir, and in 2013 her first book, Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets , was duly published by Short Books. Despite her literary success, she is a self-confessed ‘linguistic impressionist’, with a tendency to re-invent language when she speaks that is both endearing and frustrating. Her method of interpreting the words she hears through half-closed ears and repeating them in a version that bears some proximity to the original, but with blurred lines, results in an occasionally incomprehensible stew of words, seasoned with a handful of Yiddish words that she picked up from her grandmother.

The woman selling the aviation books had telephoned last week with a degree of urgency. They had belonged to her late husband, who died a year ago. She has sold the house and is moving out in March. We arrived at her house at 3 p.m. I was instantly distracted by her obvious wig, not to mention horse chestnuts scattered on the floor near the doors and windows. She explained that her husband had died from cancer and that she was now undergoing treatment for the same thing. The books were in a converted loft at the top of a narrow staircase. It took some time to negotiate a price, but we finally agreed on £750 for about 300 books. She was quite happy for me to leave the remainder behind. If only this was always the case. More often than not people want to dispose of the entire collection, particularly when it is a deceased estate. Anna and I loaded fourteen boxes into the van and left for home. The woman seemed relieved to have managed to say goodbye to what was clearly her husband’s passion, which she obviously knew she was going to find difficult to part with, despite having no interest in the subject herself. As we were leaving, Anna asked the woman about all the chestnuts around the doors and windows. It transpired that she and Anna both have a fear of spiders, and apparently horse chestnuts release a chemical that repels them.

I bought the van (a red Renault Trafic) two years ago and have almost run it into the ground. Even on the shortest of journeys I am met with enthusiastic waves from people in the oncoming traffic who have clearly mistaken me for their postman.

This aviation collection contained twenty-two Putnam Aeronautical Histories. This is a series about aircraft manufacturers, or even types of aircraft – Fokker, Hawker, Supermarine, Rocket Aircraft, and in the past they have consistently sold well both online and in the shop for between £20 and £40 per volume. So I based my price on the assumption that I could sell the Putnams fairly quickly and recover my costs.

Many book deals begin with a complete stranger calling and explaining that someone close to them has recently died, and that they have been charged with the job of disposing of their books. Understandably, they are often still grieving, and it is almost impossible not to be sucked into their grief, even in the smallest of ways. Going through the books of the person who has died affords an insight into who that person was, their interests and, to a degree, their personality. Now, even when I visit friends, I am drawn to bookcases wherever I see them, and particularly to any incongruity on the shelves which might reveal something I didn’t know about them. My own bookcase is as guilty of this as any – among the modern fiction and books about Scottish art and history that populate the shelves can be found a copy of Talk Dirty Yiddish , and Collectable Spoons of the Third Reich – the former a gift from Anna, and the latter from my friend Mike.

Anna and I drove back from Leeds over Ilkley Moor through the driving winter rain, and returned home at about 7 p.m. I unlocked the door to find piles of books on the floor, boxes everywhere and dozens of emails awaiting me. Nicky appears to gain some sort of sadistic gratification from leaving mountains of books and boxes all over the shop, probably because she knows how fastidious I am about keeping surfaces clear, particularly the floor. Perhaps because she is by nature an untidy person, she is convinced that my desire for order and organisation is highly unusual and entertaining, so she deliberately creates chaos in the shop then accuses me of having OCD when I berate her for it.

Till total £77.50

7 customers

Online orders: 8

Books found: 7