Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

Till total £184

15 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

Nicky was in today. She turned up and asked me to give her a hand taking something out of her van that she wanted to sell in the shop. It was a beautiful day, and as soon as she opened the side of her van I saw, to my horror, a mobility scooter. She had been in Castle Douglas yesterday with her friend Iris, who, for reasons unknown, is an expert on mobility scooters. They had spotted it in a charity shop window, and Iris had told Nicky it was under-priced, so Nicky raced in and bought it. I told her that there was no way I was going to start selling mobility scooters in the shop and eventually conceded that she could leave it outside the shop with a ‘For Sale’ sign on it. She tested it by riding it to the co-op and back. We made a bet in the morning that she would never sell it. By 5 p.m. she had sold it for £150 to Andy, a Wigtown resident, originally from South Africa, who had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

So I lost the bet and had to take Nicky to The Ploughman (the pub in Wigtown named after a book by John McNeillie, The Wigtown Ploughman: Part of His Life , first published by Putnam’s in 1939 and still in print today) and buy her a pint. We sat out on the pavement in the sun with Callum and a few other friends for an hour or two.

Today was the last day of term for the Scottish schools, so hopefully trade should pick up now as people come to Galloway for their holidays. The peaks and troughs of the business follow the timing of school holidays.

Till total £261.99

20 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Nicky was in again today, and is more or less back to her usual Friday/Saturday routine. I left at 5.30 a.m. to catch the ferry to Belfast, then the train to Dublin to visit Cloda. She is a friend from my time in Bristol. She now runs the family business, a pharmacy in Dublin, and we often exchange customer stories. Hers tend to be more dramatic than mine, and regularly involve heroin addicts, attempted robberies etc. Her friendship is invaluable, as it makes me feel that I am not the only person among my group of friends who is being driven mad by the public. And although Amazon has yet to branch into prescription medicine in the way that it has done with almost everything else, Cloda’s business faces similar problems as an independent competing against chains such as Lloyds and Boots.

I arrived in Dublin in the early afternoon and made my way to Cloda’s house in Stoneybatter. We had lunch, and I met her six-month-old baby, Elsa, for the first time, before we drove to the docks to pick up Anna, who had made her way over from London via Holyhead. Cloda had invited us over for an open-air concert in a park in south Dublin, headlined by Pixies and Arcade Fire. It was the first time I’d been to anything like that for years. Her partner, Leo, and her friend Roisin were there too. It was a warm, summer evening and a thoroughly good night. A scouser offered me half an E, after I had bought him a pint, but I politely declined.

Till total £143

15 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 5

I must remember to apply for the James Patterson grant.

Till total £203.45

15 customers

There is certainly still no shortage of people who darken the shop’s door with the intention of trying to sell worthless books. Most days, particularly during spring, will bring a fresh wave of them to the shop. On average, I would say a hundred books a day come through the door this way. Of these – again on average – I would offer money for fewer than 30 per cent. The remainder I would rather they took away, but often they are clearing out someone’s house – a dead aunt, grandmother or parent – and have no desire to have anything more to do with the books, so would rather leave them in the shop. In these instances, when dealing with the recently bereaved, the entreaty is often impossible to refuse. We used to stockpile these on pallets and sell them on eBay, but even that market seems to have dried up. What to do with this dead stock is increasingly becoming a problem for us and many booksellers.

Of the other type of person to which Orwell refers – the person who orders books without intending to pay for them – there certainly used to be such people until just a few years ago. Now we are rarely asked to order books thanks to the ease with which people can do it themselves from home. Or anywhere. Ordering books for customers was never a particularly lucrative exercise, but it was a small supplement to the shop’s income, and one that is now lost.

Online orders: 4

Books found: 2

Laurie couldn’t make it in to work today because her cat was hit by a car and had to be taken to the vet. Unfortunately it died, leaving her with four very small kittens to look after.

Among the orders this morning was one for The Colliery Fireman’s Pocket Book , 1935 edition. For some reason Nicky had listed this as being shelved in the chemistry section, but it was not there.

The lease on Anna’s flat runs out at the end of this month, so she has asked me if I can drive to London with the van and bring all her possessions back to Wigtown.

Matthew, a book dealer who sells at fairs and specialises in high-end material, came in and fished out a few things from the Glasgow deal, much of which was still boxed. He is another of the handful of dealers who still regularly visits the shop to buy. Fifteen years ago dealers were regular customers, coming in and buying up stock on their particular specialism. Now they are so rare that it is unusual to see them at all. Matthew deals in rare books, and mainly sells at book fairs: not the provincial fairs, but the big antiquarian fairs – Olympia, York – and the others where the average price of a book is in the thousands of pounds, rather than the tens. He only buys books in fine condition, and usually it is modern first editions. He travels all over Europe looking for books to buy and sell on at fairs, and he is like a terrier when it comes to negotiating.

Till total £291.44

21 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 6

Laurie was absent again today due to kitten-minding duties. One of today’s online sales was to someone called Keith Richards in London, and another to someone with the unlikely name of Jeremy Wildboar-Hands.

Email from a widow in Norwich wanting to sell me her late husband’s book collection. Emailed her to ask what it was.

Till total £280

21 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 1

Today I was supposed to drive to London to clear Anna’s flat, but I have postponed it because Laurie couldn’t make it in as she is on kitten duty. She didn’t seem to mind, and the flat is hers until the end of the month, so she is not about to be turfed out onto the street.