Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

Among the orders was one for the Pebble Mill Good Meat Guide.

Because we put through a reasonable volume of mail we have a contract with Royal Mail, and rather than take the parcels to the counter in the post office for Wilma, the postmaster, to deal with, we process them online, and every day either Nicky or I will take the sack of franked packages over to the post office’s back room, where they are picked up and taken to the sorting office.

The post office in Wigtown, like so many rural post offices, is part of another shop, and ours is a newsagent/toyshop owned by a Northern Irishman called William. Whatever the opposite of a sunny disposition is, William has it. In spades. He never smiles, and complains about absolutely everything. If he is in the shop when I drop the mail bags off, I always make a point of saying good morning to him. On the rare occasions that he bothers to make any sort of response, it is inevitably a muttered ‘What’s good about it?’ or ‘It might be a good morning if I wasn’t stuck in this awful place.’ Generally, the breezier the greeting you salute him with, the more hostile his response will be. As a measure of the depth of his personal well of human misery, he tapes all the magazines in the display stand with three pieces of sellotape so that it is impossible for customers to flick through them. Wilma, in marked contrast, is witty, bright and friendly. The post office is really the hub of Wigtown’s community – everyone goes there at some point during the week, and it is where gossip is exchanged and funeral notices are posted.

After lunch the till roll ran out, so I went to look for more and it appears that we have completely run out, so I ordered another twenty rolls, which should see the machine through for two or three years. Hopefully fewer, if business picks up.

Two new subscribers to the Random Book Club today. The Random Book Club is an offshoot of the shop which I set up a few years ago when business was sore and the future looked bleak. For £59 a year subscribers receive a book a month, but they have no say over what genre of book they receive, and quality control is entirely down to me. I am extremely judicious in what I choose to put in the box from which the RBC books are parcelled and sent. Since subscribers are clearly inveterate readers, I always take care to pick books that I think anyone who loves reading for its own sake would enjoy. There is nothing that would require too much technical expertise to understand: a mix of fiction and non-fiction, with the weight slightly towards non-fiction, and some poetry. Among the books going out later this month are a copy of Clive James’s Other Passports , Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell , Iris Murdoch’s biography of Sartre, Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice , and a book called 100+ Principles of Genetics . All the books are in good condition, none is ex-library, and some – several of them each year – are hundreds of years old. I estimate that if the members decided to sell the books on eBay, they would more than make their money back. There is a forum on the web site, but nobody uses it, which gives me an insight into the type of person who is attracted to the idea – they don’t like clubs where they have to interact with other people. Perhaps that is why I came up with the idea in the first place – it is a sort of Groucho Marx approach to clubs. There are about 150 members and, apart from a minimal amount of advertising in the Literary Review , the only marketing I do is to have a web site and Facebook page, neither of which I have updated for some time. Word of mouth seems to have been the best way of marketing it. It has saved me from financial embarrassment during a very difficult time in the book trade.

Till total £119.99

11 customers

Online orders: 7

Books found: 5

Norrie covered the shop so that I could go to the auction in Dumfries, about fifty miles away. This is a general sale, and it is impossible to predict what you’re going to find; the saleroom has everything from chaises-longues to washing machines, chandeliers, rugs, china, jewellery and sometimes even cars. Initially I began going to buy books, but quickly realised that the cheapest way to furnish the flat above the shop (which was empty when I bought it) was to buy furniture from the sale, so when I had full-time staff in the shop I would religiously drive there every second Tuesday and pick up bargains: pieces of antique furniture far more beautiful and infinitely cheaper than their modern equivalents from IKEA. Very occasionally I will come home with a box of books, but far more likely a Georgian bureau, a stuffed squirrel, a standard lamp or a leather armchair. Among the regulars is a charming retired submariner called Angus. He and I tend to huddle together and discuss the other buyers at the sale. He has nicknames for all of the regulars – Dave the Hat, The Bishop and others – none of them cruel, but all perfectly fitting. Today I returned with a pair of wooden Lillywhites skis, which will be used for a window display, then sold in the shop. Nowadays, because I can no longer afford full-time staff, I rarely have the opportunity to attend the auction.

When Anna is around, we always try to make the effort to go to the auction, and I will find cover for the shop. She adores it but has a £3 maximum bid, which means she always returns with a lot of rubbish, and today was no exception – a job lot that included a brass corgi, five thimbles, an old set of keys and a broken toast rack. On one occasion though, she stretched to £15 for a box of costume jewellery in which she found a ring that she thought looked interesting. She took it to a Bonhams’ free valuation day; they suggested that she consign it to a sale. It made £850.

For a few years I have given over the formal drawing room above the shop to an art class for one afternoon a week. It is taught by local artist Davy Brown and takes place every Tuesday. A dozen or so retired ladies make up the group. At this time of year the house is bitterly cold, so I left Norrie instructions to light the fire and put the space heater on for an hour before they were due to arrive, but he forgot. One of them almost needed to be resuscitated. I would happily let them use the space for free, but they kindly pay me enough to cover the heating costs and a bit more beside.

When Anna and I returned to the shop after the auction, I noticed that the left-hand window display was completely flooded (there is a large window on each side of the door to the shop which we use for themed displays). It has always been a bit leaky, but nothing like as bad as this. I removed all the soaked books and disposed of them. Now, in their place, the window display consists of six mugs, a towel and a saucepan catching the drips. Every year there is something in the house or the shop that demands the attention of a builder, and invariably it comes in the winter, when the weather is battering relentlessly and the coffers are at their emptiest. I try to budget on about £7,000 a year for keeping the roof over my head and the walls standing, and so far this has been pretty much what it has cost.

Eliot – Wigtown Book Festival director – arrived at 7 p.m. In the last weekend of September, and through to the first weekend in October, Wigtown plays host to a literary festival. In the time I have been running the shop this has grown from a handful of events with tiny audiences largely made up of locals to a huge affair with 300-seat marquees and over 200 events, which include cultural luminaries from all quarters. It is an extraordinary festival, and now – from its humble beginnings with a few volunteers running it – it has an office with five paid staff and an audience of several thousand, drawn from all over the world. Eliot was a journalist, and an extremely good one. He moved to Wigtown a few years ago, and it became quickly apparent that he was ideally suited to run the festival, so money was found to pay him and a salaried position created. He has become a good friend, and I am godfather to his second child. Now, sadly, he lives in London and I see less of him than I would wish, but when he attends Festival Company board meetings in Wigtown, he stays with me. As always, shortly after his arrival he removed his shoes and threw them on the floor. Within ten minutes I had tripped over them.