Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

AbeBooks emailed to tell me that our account has been suspended because we have dropped below their order fulfilment minimum of 85 per cent for a month. I replied and asked how we could be reinstated.

An old man with a walking stick accosted Nicky as she was rifling through a box of books that was destined for Cash for Clothes – ‘I’m looking for a book, but I don’t know what it’s called. I know what it looks like, though. It’s a very old book.’

Sandy the tattooed pagan turned up with some more sticks. Sold one straight away.

Till total £388.03

39 customers

Online orders: 1

Books found: 1

Nicky in again today. For Foodie Friday today she brought in bhajis and pickle – as always, pillaged from the Morrisons skip.

AbeBooks emailed me with a ridiculously complex explanation of how to reinstate our account, which involves me explaining why our fulfilment levels dropped, and what we are going to do to make sure that they improve. It felt very much like apologising for being caught smoking at school. I blamed Laurie and told the woman at AbeBooks (Emma) that I had sacked her for being lazy, and that this was my strategy for improving order fulfilment. She seemed quite satisfied with that.

In the afternoon I drove to Dumfries to look at the library of a retired Church of Scotland minister. He had recently lost his wife, but seemed surprisingly cheery in spite of this. Or perhaps because of it. I took one box of mixed material away and gave him £75. The only reasonable book was a copy of Galloway Gossip , which used to command a price of £40 but now makes less than £20.

Got back to the shop at 3.30 p.m., just in time to overhear a customer saying to her crumbling wreck of a husband, ‘I have just had a wander through the garden. There’s a gate with a sign which says “Private” but I went through anyway. It’s lovely.’

Nicky found a book called Working with Depressed Women , which she has decided to keep for herself. We went to the pub after closing the shop, and she spent the night in the festival bed.

Till total £328.89

27 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Today we had our first AbeBooks order since June. They have clearly, finally, let us back on as sellers.

While Nicky was taking the mail bags to the post office, a customer found an 1876 edition of Daniel Deronda priced at £6.50 and brought it to the counter asking ‘How much could this be?’ I was sorely tempted to tell her that it ‘could be £7.50’. She didn’t even bother waiting for a reply, and went completely off-piste, saying ‘I found Venice terribly disappointing. It was full of tourists’, the perpetual complaint of the pretentious tourist.

I left Nicky in charge and drove to Glasgow airport with Anna, who’s going to visit her family in America.

Till total £211.86

29 customers

The children’s section of the shop is always a mess. No amount of tidying will keep it neat for more than a day or two, although we maintain the Sisyphean effort of trying to keep it so. As much as I’d like to blame the children who make it a mess, I suppose it’s just what children do. It gives me a glimmer of hope for the future of bookselling, though, to see a child reading, their attention rapt in the book to the total exclusion of everything else. In general, it appears – in my shop at least – that girls are more committed readers than boys. It was certainly something in which I had a limited interest as a child. Neither boys nor girls ever pick up Barrie, though. Of the Scottish writers of that period only Stevenson and Buchan seem to have stood the test of time, still selling well in the shop.

Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books are good sellers too, but to collectors rather than children. I once bought a set of them from another dealer, and took them to a book fair (another part of the trade that, with a few notable exceptions, appears to be exhaling the last rattling gasp of its dying breath). The most lucrative trade at book fairs takes place between dealers as they’re setting up stall, before the public comes in. This was no exception, and – less than a week after I had bought them for £400 – I sold the set of Lang’s Fairy Books for £550 to another bookseller at the Lancaster Book Fair. Since then I have not gone to another fair. The cost of travel, accommodation and the stall and the pitiful prices that people are prepared to pay for books these days have made all but the top-end fairs almost entirely financially unviable.

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

Laurie was in the shop today. After she arrived I drove to Newton Stewart to lodge last week’s takings at the bank and pick up my new glasses from the optician’s. Isabel turned up at 3.30 p.m., spotted my new specs and said, ‘Oh, they make you look quite intelligent.’ She could give lessons in damning with faint praise.

Till total £153.54

15 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 2

Laurie in bright and early. At 2 p.m. a customer with a very neatly trimmed moustache came to the counter and said, ‘I’ve been looking for a copy of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World for years after I lent mine to a friend who never gave it back to me. I see you have a copy, but it’s £23. It seems a lot of money for an old book.’ So, after years of looking for a copy of The Worst Journey in the World , he finally found one, and a scarce edition too, but £23 was too much.

As I was sorting through the boxes of books from Haugh of Urr, I came across a copy of Collins French Phrasebook in a box. You really would have to be on the most dismal holiday to find the following phrases useful:

‘Someone has fallen in the water.’

‘Can you make a splint?’

‘She has been run over.’

‘Help me carry him.’

‘I wish to be X-rayed.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘I do not like this.’

‘The chambermaid never comes when I ring.’

‘I was here in 1940.’

‘Eleven hostages were shot here.’

Till total £218.93

20 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Laurie opened the shop at 9 a.m., but neglected to turn the sign from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’. By the time I noticed it, 10.30 a.m., not a single customer had entered the shop.

A Shearings coach stopped outside the shop at 3 p.m. This invariably results in a busload of Yorkshire pensioners invading the shop, complaining about absolutely everything, taking anything that’s free, then leaving ten minutes later, urgently demanding to know where the nearest public toilet is. Today’s onslaught was made slightly more bearable by the coach driver, who was the only one of them to buy anything. We shared a look of mutual pity. Shortly after they all left, a woman wandered through the shop shouting, ‘Liz! Karen!’ at the top of her voice. It turned out that the Shearings coach was waiting for them before it could leave. The post-invasion tranquillity of the shop was briefly shattered by her high-pitched bawling.