Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

Mr Deacon dropped in to collect his copy of Eleanor of Aquitaine : ‘I’m in Wigtown seeing the doctor in any case, so I thought I’d collect the book while I am at it.’

My parents called in for a cup of tea at about 4.30 p.m. My father retired from farming about fifteen years ago, around the time I bought the shop (with their enthusiastic encouragement). They sold the farmhouse and steading – which they had converted into holiday cottages when I was a child – and moved to a modern house about five miles away in 2000, thirty years to the day after they had moved into the farm. They kept the land and now rent it to a tenant. My mother, ever the entrepreneur, keeps busy with various projects, while my father has occupied himself with restoring old cars since his retirement. The first was a Bentley, and he is currently working on an Alvis. As I was locking up the shop five minutes after they left, I caught my mother picking the saltire sticker off the back door of the new van.

After work I went to The Ploughman for a pint with Callum and Tracy to celebrate Tracy being another year closer to death.

Till total £263.98

31 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

Nicky was in today, and miraculously turned up bang on time. It was a dismally wet morning, but it brightened up in the afternoon, in the middle of which I received a text message from Katie. Apparently I had offered her work for the summer, and she is coming in tomorrow. Oh dear. I will have to cut Laurie’s hours as I can’t afford two sets of wages.

Nicky was all set to go to the Edinburgh Book Festival on Wednesday to distribute propaganda about the Random Book Club, so I checked online to see what events and authors she should target. It turns out that it doesn’t start until next Saturday, and she had misread the dates.

Anna Dreda from Wenlock Books (in Much Wenlock, in Shropshire) and her partner, Hilary, arrived. I had invited them to stay en route back from their holiday on North Uist. We stayed up late talking shop. It is rare to have an opportunity to compare notes with another bookseller, and it is always reassuring to hear that other people are facing the same problems, largely caused by the relentless march of Amazon. Anna has adapted to the situation by cutting paid staff and relying on volunteers – something that I hadn’t considered – as well as organising events in her shop. They are here for a couple of days.

At closing time a man from Ballater, in Aberdeenshire, telephoned. He has a collection of books on polar exploration that he is keen to sell, so we have arranged that I will see him on Wednesday. If it is a good collection, it is the sort of thing that might sell well during the upcoming book festival.

Till total £495.49

36 customers

Online orders: 7

Books found: 7

Bank holiday. Katie and Laurie were both in today. Katie’s further education as a doctor seems merely to have served to make her more acerbic – I was barefoot in the shop when she arrived, and she told me that I made the place look more like a homeless shelter than a bookshop.

A customer brought in four boxes of books on medieval literature. I picked out a few and gave him £60 for them. Katie spent the day alphabetically organising the crime section, finishing the job started by Andrew before it became too much for him.

As I was tidying the shelves in the psychology section, I came across a book called Atomic Structure and Chemical Bonding , which had clearly been put there by Nicky. I will speak to her about it on Friday. I also spotted that she has created a new section called ‘Home Front Novels’, which I removed immediately and put in the boxes for recycling.

Hilary is very keen on Gavin Maxwell, so I took her and Anna on a tour that included the House of Elrig, his childhood home, the Maxwell memorial at Monreith and a quick look at Monreith House. Afterwards I went down to the cattle show ground to film some aerial shots using the drone, on which is mounted a small GoPro video camera, as the setting sun was stunning.

Several years ago a friend gave me a copy of one of her favourite books: A Confederacy of Dunces , by John Kennedy Toole. It has been sitting on my pile of books to read, so I began reading it after I closed the shop.

Till total £346

26 customers

Online orders: 0

Books found: 0

Laurie and Katie were both in the shop again today. I really need to split them, as I can’t afford to pay them both. Next week they will work three days each with no overlap.

No orders today, so I suspect that there is a problem with Monsoon. I have emailed them to let them know.

Anna and Hilary left for Much Wenlock, but before they did, they told me that they want to come back with a book group and run a creative writing course in the shop in February. I warned them about the temperature. They didn’t seem to be put off. I’m not sure how it would work financially, so I suggested that they could use the house for free the first year – they seem to think that the drawing room would be an ideal venue – and if it works, we can find a way of repeating it but with a small fee for the use of the house.

Katie spent the day ordering the poetry section, which has become chaotically disorganised.

Internet stopped working at 3 p.m.

Till total £550.34

52 customers

Online orders: 0

Books found: 0

When I came downstairs in the morning to open the shop there was still no internet connection, so I telephoned Titan Telecom, my new supplier, who told me that I would need a new username and password. When I explained that this was a matter of urgency, as we had no orders coming through, they said that a technician would call back soon, so I left Laurie and Katie with instructions to sort it out.

It rained heavily last night, and the morning was cloudy, but it turned into a glorious day in spite of the forecast. Just as well, as it was Wigtown Show day. I spent most of the day filming sheep, cows, horses and chickens and chatting to farmers. Wigtown Show is one of the oldest agricultural shows in Scotland. It has been held annually for 200 years, and it entails marquees filled with people selling country craft things and food. There’s music and a bar and all manner of entertainment, as well as the pens full of livestock.

The Titan Telecom technician called at 3.45 p.m., and we were back online by 4 p.m., so the two sets of wages I paid the girls to list books online were, thanks to technical problems, wasted.

Laurie and Katie went to the post-cattle show party in the marquee and stayed overnight in the shop. I went to bed at about 1 a.m. and they still hadn’t come home.

Till total £386.90

43 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 4

Laurie was up at about 8.50 a.m., Katie at about 9.15 a.m. Both looked pretty hungover and were relatively useless all day.

Till total £337.05

28 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

I left for Ballater at 7 a.m., so Laurie opened the shop today. Nicky was at home making things to take to Edinburgh next week to help promote the Random Book Club at their book festival. She is planning to go up on Wednesday and Thursday and hand out flyers and free books, most of which – she has now told me – she just removed from the shelves of the shop without asking me.

I arrived in Ballater just before noon and found the house, a small, unattractive bungalow in a scheme of identical small, unattractive bungalows, all with fussy rose gardens. The man who greeted me at the door was small and bearded, and wearing a dressing gown and slippers. His wife was identically attired. The house was small and cluttered, and a layer of dust and grime appeared to cover every surface. The books were in several rooms throughout the house, many of them upstairs in a converted attic with a very narrow staircase leading up to it. The wife made me a cup of tea, and I worked my way through the collection while they watched television. They were friendly enough but didn’t appear to want to chat. The books were slightly disappointing – Nansen’s Farthest North in a two-volume leather-bound edition in poor condition, the Penguin edition of Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World and Admiral Evans’s South with Scott – and most of the collection was in average to poor condition. There were none of the big hitters you always hope for in a polar collection – Shackleton’s South in the first edition, or The Heart of the Antarctic in the de luxe edition, which is probably just as well as money is tight this year. After an hour or so I had amassed about six boxes of books, all about the Antarctic, and we agreed a price of £300. Both the man and his wife had been fairly uncommunicative but not unfriendly, and I had early on decided that he probably had little to say for himself, but as I was loading the boxes into the van I asked what had piqued his interest in Antarctica, at which point he became surprisingly animated. He had been part of the British Antarctic Survey in his thirties and had been there for several summers doing research. I really ought to be less dismissive of customers and people selling books.